human rights situation essay

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Essay on Human Rights: Samples in 500 and 1500

• Updated on  
• Jun 20, 2024

Essay writing is an integral part of the school curriculum and various academic and competitive exams like IELTS , TOEFL , SAT , UPSC , etc. It is designed to test your command of the English language and how well you can gather your thoughts and present them in a structure with a flow. To master your ability to write an essay, you must read as much as possible and practise on any given topic. This blog brings you a detailed guide on how to write an essay on Human Rights , with useful essay samples on Human rights.

This Blog Includes:

The basic human rights, 200 words essay on human rights, 500 words essay on human rights, 500+ words essay on human rights in india, 1500 words essay on human rights, importance of human rights, essay on human rights pdf, what are human rights.

Human rights mark everyone as free and equal, irrespective of age, gender, caste, creed, religion and nationality. The United Nations adopted human rights in light of the atrocities people faced during the Second World War. On the 10th of December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Its adoption led to the recognition of human rights as the foundation for freedom, justice and peace for every individual. Although it’s not legally binding, most nations have incorporated these human rights into their constitutions and domestic legal frameworks. Human rights safeguard us from discrimination and guarantee that our most basic needs are protected.

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Before we move on to the essays on human rights, let’s check out the basics of what they are.

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Here is a 200-word short sample essay on basic Human Rights.

Human rights are a set of rights given to every human being regardless of their gender, caste, creed, religion, nation, location or economic status. These are said to be moral principles that illustrate certain standards of human behaviour. Protected by law , these rights are applicable everywhere and at any time. Basic human rights include the right to life, right to a fair trial, right to remedy by a competent tribunal, right to liberty and personal security, right to own property, right to education, right of peaceful assembly and association, right to marriage and family, right to nationality and freedom to change it, freedom of speech, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of movement, right of opinion and information, right to adequate living standard and freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence.

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Check out this 500-word long essay on Human Rights.

Every person has dignity and value. One of the ways that we recognise the fundamental worth of every person is by acknowledging and respecting their human rights. Human rights are a set of principles concerned with equality and fairness. They recognise our freedom to make choices about our lives and develop our potential as human beings. They are about living a life free from fear, harassment or discrimination.

Human rights can broadly be defined as the basic rights that people worldwide have agreed are essential. These include the right to life, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to health, education and an adequate standard of living. These human rights are the same for all people everywhere – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of our background, where we live, what we think or believe. This basic property is what makes human rights’ universal’.

Human rights connect us all through a shared set of rights and responsibilities. People’s ability to enjoy their human rights depends on other people respecting those rights. This means that human rights involve responsibility and duties towards other people and the community. Individuals have a responsibility to ensure that they exercise their rights with consideration for the rights of others. For example, when someone uses their right to freedom of speech, they should do so without interfering with someone else’s right to privacy.

Governments have a particular responsibility to ensure that people can enjoy their rights. They must establish and maintain laws and services that enable people to enjoy a life in which their rights are respected and protected. For example, the right to education says that everyone is entitled to a good education. Therefore, governments must provide good quality education facilities and services to their people. If the government fails to respect or protect their basic human rights, people can take it into account.

Values of tolerance, equality and respect can help reduce friction within society. Putting human rights ideas into practice can help us create the kind of society we want to live in. There has been tremendous growth in how we think about and apply human rights ideas in recent decades. This growth has had many positive results – knowledge about human rights can empower individuals and offer solutions for specific problems.

Human rights are an important part of how people interact with others at all levels of society – in the family, the community, school, workplace, politics and international relations. Therefore, people everywhere must strive to understand what human rights are. When people better understand human rights, it is easier for them to promote justice and the well-being of society. 

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Here is a human rights essay focused on India.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It has been rightly proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Created with certain unalienable rights….” Similarly, the Indian Constitution has ensured and enshrined Fundamental rights for all citizens irrespective of caste, creed, religion, colour, sex or nationality. These basic rights, commonly known as human rights, are recognised the world over as basic rights with which every individual is born.

In recognition of human rights, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made on the 10th of December, 1948. This declaration is the basic instrument of human rights. Even though this declaration has no legal bindings and authority, it forms the basis of all laws on human rights. The necessity of formulating laws to protect human rights is now being felt all over the world. According to social thinkers, the issue of human rights became very important after World War II concluded. It is important for social stability both at the national and international levels. Wherever there is a breach of human rights, there is conflict at one level or the other.

Given the increasing importance of the subject, it becomes necessary that educational institutions recognise the subject of human rights as an independent discipline. The course contents and curriculum of the discipline of human rights may vary according to the nature and circumstances of a particular institution. Still, generally, it should include the rights of a child, rights of minorities, rights of the needy and the disabled, right to live, convention on women, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation etc.

Since the formation of the United Nations , the promotion and protection of human rights have been its main focus. The United Nations has created a wide range of mechanisms for monitoring human rights violations. The conventional mechanisms include treaties and organisations, U.N. special reporters, representatives and experts and working groups. Asian countries like China argue in favour of collective rights. According to Chinese thinkers, European countries lay stress upon individual rights and values while Asian countries esteem collective rights and obligations to the family and society as a whole.

With the freedom movement the world over after World War II, the end of colonisation also ended the policy of apartheid and thereby the most aggressive violation of human rights. With the spread of education, women are asserting their rights. Women’s movements play an important role in spreading the message of human rights. They are fighting for their rights and supporting the struggle for human rights of other weaker and deprived sections like bonded labour, child labour, landless labour, unemployed persons, Dalits and elderly people.

Unfortunately, violation of human rights continues in most parts of the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide can still be seen in several parts of the world. Large sections of the world population are deprived of the necessities of life i.e. food, shelter and security of life. Right to minimum basic needs viz. Work, health care, education and shelter are denied to them. These deprivations amount to the negation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Check out this detailed 1500-word essay on human rights.

The human right to live and exist, the right to equality, including equality before the law, non-discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, the right to freedom of speech and expression, assembly, association, movement, residence, the right to practice any profession or occupation, the right against exploitation, prohibiting all forms of forced labour, child labour and trafficking in human beings, the right to freedom of conscience, practice and propagation of religion and the right to legal remedies for enforcement of the above are basic human rights. These rights and freedoms are the very foundations of democracy.

Obviously, in a democracy, the people enjoy the maximum number of freedoms and rights. Besides these are political rights, which include the right to contest an election and vote freely for a candidate of one’s choice. Human rights are a benchmark of a developed and civilised society. But rights cannot exist in a vacuum. They have their corresponding duties. Rights and duties are the two aspects of the same coin.

Liberty never means license. Rights presuppose the rule of law, where everyone in the society follows a code of conduct and behaviour for the good of all. It is the sense of duty and tolerance that gives meaning to rights. Rights have their basis in the ‘live and let live’ principle. For example, my right to speech and expression involves my duty to allow others to enjoy the same freedom of speech and expression. Rights and duties are inextricably interlinked and interdependent. A perfect balance is to be maintained between the two. Whenever there is an imbalance, there is chaos.

A sense of tolerance, propriety and adjustment is a must to enjoy rights and freedom. Human life sans basic freedom and rights is meaningless. Freedom is the most precious possession without which life would become intolerable, a mere abject and slavish existence. In this context, Milton’s famous and oft-quoted lines from his Paradise Lost come to mind: “To reign is worth ambition though in hell/Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

However, liberty cannot survive without its corresponding obligations and duties. An individual is a part of society in which he enjoys certain rights and freedom only because of the fulfilment of certain duties and obligations towards others. Thus, freedom is based on mutual respect’s rights. A fine balance must be maintained between the two, or there will be anarchy and bloodshed. Therefore, human rights can best be preserved and protected in a society steeped in morality, discipline and social order.

Violation of human rights is most common in totalitarian and despotic states. In the theocratic states, there is much persecution, and violation in the name of religion and the minorities suffer the most. Even in democracies, there is widespread violation and infringement of human rights and freedom. The women, children and the weaker sections of society are victims of these transgressions and violence.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights’ main concern is to protect and promote human rights and freedom in the world’s nations. In its various sessions held from time to time in Geneva, it adopts various measures to encourage worldwide observations of these basic human rights and freedom. It calls on its member states to furnish information regarding measures that comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whenever there is a complaint of a violation of these rights. In addition, it reviews human rights situations in various countries and initiates remedial measures when required.

The U.N. Commission was much concerned and dismayed at the apartheid being practised in South Africa till recently. The Secretary-General then declared, “The United Nations cannot tolerate apartheid. It is a legalised system of racial discrimination, violating the most basic human rights in South Africa. It contradicts the letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter. That is why over the last forty years, my predecessors and I have urged the Government of South Africa to dismantle it.”

Now, although apartheid is no longer practised in that country, other forms of apartheid are being blatantly practised worldwide. For example, sex apartheid is most rampant. Women are subject to abuse and exploitation. They are not treated equally and get less pay than their male counterparts for the same jobs. In employment, promotions, possession of property etc., they are most discriminated against. Similarly, the rights of children are not observed properly. They are forced to work hard in very dangerous situations, sexually assaulted and exploited, sold and bonded for labour.

The Commission found that religious persecution, torture, summary executions without judicial trials, intolerance, slavery-like practices, kidnapping, political disappearance, etc., are being practised even in the so-called advanced countries and societies. The continued acts of extreme violence, terrorism and extremism in various parts of the world like Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon, Chile, China, and Myanmar, etc., by the governments, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, and mafia outfits, etc., is a matter of grave concern for the entire human race.

Violation of freedom and rights by terrorist groups backed by states is one of the most difficult problems society faces. For example, Pakistan has been openly collaborating with various terrorist groups, indulging in extreme violence in India and other countries. In this regard the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva adopted a significant resolution, which was co-sponsored by India, focusing on gross violation of human rights perpetrated by state-backed terrorist groups.

The resolution expressed its solidarity with the victims of terrorism and proposed that a U.N. Fund for victims of terrorism be established soon. The Indian delegation recalled that according to the Vienna Declaration, terrorism is nothing but the destruction of human rights. It shows total disregard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. The delegation further argued that terrorism cannot be treated as a mere crime because it is systematic and widespread in its killing of civilians.

Violation of human rights, whether by states, terrorists, separatist groups, armed fundamentalists or extremists, is condemnable. Regardless of the motivation, such acts should be condemned categorically in all forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever they are committed, as acts of aggression aimed at destroying human rights, fundamental freedom and democracy. The Indian delegation also underlined concerns about the growing connection between terrorist groups and the consequent commission of serious crimes. These include rape, torture, arson, looting, murder, kidnappings, blasts, and extortion, etc.

Violation of human rights and freedom gives rise to alienation, dissatisfaction, frustration and acts of terrorism. Governments run by ambitious and self-seeking people often use repressive measures and find violence and terror an effective means of control. However, state terrorism, violence, and human freedom transgressions are very dangerous strategies. This has been the background of all revolutions in the world. Whenever there is systematic and widespread state persecution and violation of human rights, rebellion and revolution have taken place. The French, American, Russian and Chinese Revolutions are glowing examples of human history.

The first war of India’s Independence in 1857 resulted from long and systematic oppression of the Indian masses. The rapidly increasing discontent, frustration and alienation with British rule gave rise to strong national feelings and demand for political privileges and rights. Ultimately the Indian people, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, made the British leave India, setting the country free and independent.

Human rights and freedom ought to be preserved at all costs. Their curtailment degrades human life. The political needs of a country may reshape Human rights, but they should not be completely distorted. Tyranny, regimentation, etc., are inimical of humanity and should be resisted effectively and united. The sanctity of human values, freedom and rights must be preserved and protected. Human Rights Commissions should be established in all countries to take care of human freedom and rights. In cases of violation of human rights, affected individuals should be properly compensated, and it should be ensured that these do not take place in future.

These commissions can become effective instruments in percolating the sensitivity to human rights down to the lowest levels of governments and administrations. The formation of the National Human Rights Commission in October 1993 in India is commendable and should be followed by other countries.

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Human rights are of utmost importance to seek basic equality and human dignity. Human rights ensure that the basic needs of every human are met. They protect vulnerable groups from discrimination and abuse, allow people to stand up for themselves, and follow any religion without fear and give them the freedom to express their thoughts freely. In addition, they grant people access to basic education and equal work opportunities. Thus implementing these rights is crucial to ensure freedom, peace and safety.

Human Rights Day is annually celebrated on the 10th of December.

Human Rights Day is celebrated to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UNGA in 1948.

Some of the common Human Rights are the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from slavery and torture and the right to work and education.

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Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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"Why Human Rights?": Reflection by Eleni Christou

This post is the first installment from UChicago Law's International Human Rights Law Clinic in a series titled — The Matter of Human Rights. In this 16-part series, law students examine, question and reflect on the historical, ideological, and normative roots of the human rights system, how the system has evolved, its present challenges and future possibilities. Eleni Christou is a third year in the Law School at the University of Chicago.

Why Human Rights?

By: Eleni Christou University of Chicago Law School Class of 2019

When the term “human rights” is used, it conjures up, for some, powerful images of the righteous fight for the inalienable rights that people have just by virtue of being human. It is Martin Luther King Jr. before the Washington monument as hundreds of thousands gather and look on; it is Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom; or a 16-year-old Malala telling her story, so others like her may be heard. But what is beyond these archetypes? Does the system work? Can we make it work better? Is it even the right system for our times? In other words, why human rights?

Human rights are rights that every person has from the moment they are born to the moment they die. They are things that everyone is entitled to, such as life, liberty, freedom of expression, and the right to education, just by virtue of being human. People can never lose these rights on the basis of age, sex, nationality, race, or disability. Human rights offer us a principled framework, rooted in normative values meant for all nations and legal orders. In a world order in which states/governments set the rules, the human rights regime is the counterweight, one concerned with and focused on the individual. In other words, we need human rights because it provides us a way of evaluating and challenging national laws and practices as to the treatment of individuals.

The foundational human right text for our modern-day system is the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1948, this document lays out 30 articles which define the rights each human is entitled to. These rights are designed to protect core human values and prohibit institutions and practices that are contrary to the enjoyment of the rights. Rights often complement each other, and at times, can be combined to form new rights. For example, humans have a right to liberty, and also a right to be free from slavery, two rights which complement and reinforce each other. Other times, rights can be in tension, like when a person’s right to freedom of expression infringes upon another’s right to freedom from discrimination.

In this post, I’ll provide an example of how the human rights system has been used to do important work. The international communities’ work to develop the law and organize around human rights principles to challenge and sanction the apartheid regime in South Africa provides a valuable illustration of how the human rights system can be used successfully to alleviate state human rights violations that previously would have been written off as a domestic matter.

From 1948 to 1994, South Africa had a system of racial segregation called ‘ apartheid ,’ literally meaning ‘separateness.’ The minority white population was committing blatant human rights violations to maintain their control over the majority black population, and smaller multiethnic and South Asian communities. This system of apartheid was codified in laws at every level of the country, restricting where non-whites could live, work, and simply be. Non-whites were stripped of  voting rights ,  evicted from their homes  and forced into segregated neighborhoods, and not allowed to travel out of these neighborhoods without  passes . Interracial marriage was forbidden, and transport and civil facilities were all segregated, leading to extremely inferior services for the majority of South Africans. The horrific conditions imposed on non-whites led to  internal resistance movements , which the white ruling class responded to with  extreme violence , leaving thousands dead or imprisoned by the government.

While certain global leaders expressed concern about the Apartheid regime in South Africa, at first, most (including the newly-formed UN) considered it a domestic affair. However, that view changed in 1960 following the  Sharpeville Massacre , where 69 protesters of the travel pass requirement were murdered by South African police. In 1963, the United Nations Security Council passed  Resolution 181 , which called for a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa, which was later made mandatory. The Security Council condemned South Africa’s apartheid regime and encouraged states not to “indirectly [provide] encouragement . . . [of] South Africa to perpetuate, by force, its policy of apartheid,” by participating in the embargo. During this time, many countries, including the United States, ended their arms trade with South Africa. Additionally, the UN urged an oil embargo, and eventually  suspended South Africa  from the General Assembly in 1974.

In 1973, the UN General Assembly passed the  International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid , and it came into force in 1976. This convention made apartheid a crime against humanity. It expanded the prohibition of apartheid and similar policies outside of the South African context, and laid the groundwork for international actions to be taken against any state that engaged in these policies. This also served to further legitimize the international response to South Africa’s apartheid regime.

As the state-sanctioned violence in South Africa intensified, and the global community came to understand the human rights violation being carried out on a massive scale, countries worked domestically to place trade sanctions on South Africa, and many divestment movements gained popular support. International sports teams refused to play in South Africa and cut ties with their sports federations, and many actors engaged in cultural boycotts. These domestic actions worked in tandem with the actions taken by the United Nations, mirroring the increasingly widespread ideology that human rights violations are a global issue that transcend national boundaries, but are an international concern of all peoples.

After years of domestic and international pressure, South African leadership released the resistance leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 and began negotiations for the dismantling of apartheid. In 1994, South Africa’s apartheid officially ended with the first general elections. With universal suffrage, Nelson Mandela was elected president.

In a  speech to the UN General Assembly , newly elected Nelson Mandela recognized the role that the UN and individual countries played in the ending of apartheid, noting these interventions were a success story of the human rights system. The human rights values embodied in the UDHR, the ICSPCA, and numerous UN Security Council resolutions, provided an external normative and legal framework by which the global community could identify unlawful state action and hold South Africa accountable for its system of apartheid. The international pressure applied via the human rights system has been considered a major contributing factor to the end of apartheid. While the country has not fully recovered from the trauma that decades of the apartheid regime had left on its people, the end of the apartheid formal legal system has allowed the country to begin to heal and move towards a government that works for all people, one that has openly embraced international human rights law and principles in its constitutional and legislative framework.

This is what a human rights system can do. When state governments and legal orders fail to protect people within their control, the international system can challenge the national order and demand it uphold a basic standard of good governance. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights system has grown, tackled new challenges, developed institutions for review and enforcement, and built a significant body of law. Numerous tools have been established to help states, groups, and individuals defend and protect human rights.

So why human rights? Because the human rights system has been a powerful force for good in this world, often the only recourse for marginalized and minority populations. We, as the global community, should work to identify shortcomings in the system, and work together to improve and fix them. We should not —  as the US has been doing under the current administration  — selectively withdraw, defund, and disparage one of the only tools available to the world’s most vulnerable peoples. The human rights system is an arena, a language, and a source of power to many around the world fighting for a worthwhile future built on our shared human values.

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• Introduction

Origins in ancient Greece and Rome

• Natural law transformed into natural rights
• “Nonsense upon stilts”: the critics of natural rights
• The persistence of the notion
• The nature of human rights: commonly accepted postulates
• Liberté : civil and political rights
• Égalité : economic, social, and cultural rights
• Fraternité : solidarity or group rights
• Liberté versus égalité
• The relevance of custom and tradition: the universalist-relativist debate
• Inherent risks in the debate
• Developments before World War II
• The UN Commission on Human Rights and its instruments
• The UN Human Rights Council and its instruments
• Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Its Optional Protocols
• Other UN human rights conventions and declarations
• Human rights and the Helsinki process
• Human rights in Europe
• Human rights in the Americas
• Human rights in Africa
• Human rights in the Arab world
• Human rights in Asia
• International human rights in domestic courts
• Human rights in the early 21st century

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human rights , rights that belong to an individual or group of individuals simply for being human, or as a consequence of inherent human vulnerability, or because they are requisite to the possibility of a just society. Whatever their theoretical justification, human rights refer to a wide continuum of values or capabilities thought to enhance human agency or protect human interests and declared to be universal in character, in some sense equally claimed for all human beings, present and future.

It is a common observation that human beings everywhere require the realization of diverse values or capabilities to ensure their individual and collective well-being. It also is a common observation that this requirement—whether conceived or expressed as a moral or a legal demand—is often painfully frustrated by social as well as natural forces, resulting in exploitation, oppression, persecution, and other forms of deprivation. Deeply rooted in these twin observations are the beginnings of what today are called “human rights” and the national and international legal processes associated with them.

Historical development

The expression human rights is relatively new, having come into everyday parlance only since World War II , the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It replaced the phrase natural rights, which fell into disfavour in the 19th century in part because the concept of natural law (to which it was intimately linked) had become controversial with the rise of legal positivism . Legal positivism rejected the theory, long espoused by the Roman Catholic Church , that law must be moral to be law. The term human rights also replaced the later phrase the rights of Man, which was not universally understood to include the rights of women.

Most students of human rights trace the origins of the concept of human rights to ancient Greece and Rome , where it was closely tied to the doctrines of the Stoics , who held that human conduct should be judged according to, and brought into harmony with, the law of nature . A classic example of this view is given in Sophocles ’ play Antigone , in which the title character, upon being reproached by King Creon for defying his command not to bury her slain brother, asserted that she acted in accordance with the immutable laws of the gods.

In part because Stoicism played a key role in its formation and spread, Roman law similarly allowed for the existence of a natural law and with it—pursuant to the jus gentium (“law of nations”)—certain universal rights that extended beyond the rights of citizenship. According to the Roman jurist Ulpian , for example, natural law was that which nature, not the state, assures to all human beings, Roman citizens or not.

It was not until after the Middle Ages , however, that natural law became associated with natural rights. In Greco-Roman and medieval times, doctrines of natural law concerned mainly the duties, rather than the rights, of “Man.” Moreover, as evidenced in the writings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas , these doctrines recognized the legitimacy of slavery and serfdom and, in so doing, excluded perhaps the most important ideas of human rights as they are understood today—freedom (or liberty) and equality .

The conception of human rights as natural rights (as opposed to a classical natural order of obligation) was made possible by certain basic societal changes, which took place gradually beginning with the decline of European feudalism from about the 13th century and continuing through the Renaissance to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). During this period, resistance to religious intolerance and political and economic bondage; the evident failure of rulers to meet their obligations under natural law; and the unprecedented commitment to individual expression and worldly experience that was characteristic of the Renaissance all combined to shift the conception of natural law from duties to rights. The teachings of Aquinas and Hugo Grotius on the European continent, the Magna Carta (1215) and its companion Charter of the Forests (1217), the Petition of Right (1628), and the English Bill of Rights (1689) in England were signs of this change. Each testified to the increasingly popular view that human beings are endowed with certain eternal and inalienable rights that never were renounced when humankind “contracted” to enter the social order from the natural order and never were diminished by the claim of the “ divine right of kings .”

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Human Rights

Human rights are norms that aspire to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses. Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to education. The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims often made on behalf of human rights (for example, that they are universal, inalienable, or exist independently of legal enactment as justified moral norms) have frequently provoked skeptical doubts and countering philosophical defenses (on these doubts see Lacroix & Pranchère 2016; Mutua 2002; and Waldron 1987). Reflection on these doubts and the responses that can be made to them has become a sub-field of political and legal philosophy with a very substantial literature (see the extensive Bibliography below). This entry addresses the concept of human rights, the existence and grounds of human rights, the question of which rights are human rights, and relativism about human rights.

1. The General Idea of Human Rights

2.1 how can human rights exist, 2.2 justifications for human rights, 3.1 civil and political rights, 3.2 economic and social rights, 3.3 human rights of women, minorities, and groups, 3.4 new human rights, 4. universal human rights in a world of diverse beliefs and practices, a. books and articles in the philosophy of human rights, b. legal declarations, other internet resources, related entries.

This section attempts to explain the general idea of human rights by identifying four defining features. The goal is to answer the question of what human rights are with a description of the concept rather than with a list of specific rights. Two people can have the same general idea of human rights even though they disagree about which rights are really human rights and even about whether universal human rights are a good idea. The four-part explanation just below attempts to cover all kinds of human rights including both moral and legal human rights as well as old and new human rights (e.g., both Lockean natural rights and contemporary human rights). The explanation anticipates, however, that particular kinds of human rights will have additional features. Starting with this general concept does not commit us to treating all kinds of human rights in a single unified theory (see Buchanan 2013 for an argument that we should not attempt to theorize together universal moral rights and international legal human rights).

Human rights are rights . Lest we miss the obvious, human rights are rights (see Cruft 2012 and the entry on rights ). Rights focus on a freedom, protection, status, immunity, or benefit for the rightholders. Most human rights are claim rights that impose duties or responsibilities on their addressees or dutybearers. The duties associated with human rights often require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision. Although human rights are usually mandatory in the sense of imposing duties on specified parties, some legal human rights seem to do little more than declare high-priority goals and assign responsibility for their progressive realization. One can argue, of course, that goalish rights are not real rights, but it may be better to recognize that they comprise a weak but useful notion of a right. (See Beitz 2009 for a defense of the view that not all human rights are rights in a strong sense. Also, see Feinberg 1973 for the idea of “manifesto rights” and Nickel 2013 for a discussion of “rightslike goals”.)

Human rights are plural and come in lists . If someone accepted that there are human rights but held that there is only one of them, this might make sense if she meant that there is one abstract underlying right that generates a list of specific rights (see Dworkin 2011 for a view of this sort). But if this person meant that there is just one specific right such as the right to peaceful assembly this would be a highly revisionary view. Some philosophers advocate very short lists of human rights but nevertheless accept plurality (see Ignatieff 2004).

Human rights are universal . All living humans—or perhaps we should say all living persons —have human rights. One does not have to be a particular kind of person or a member of some specific nation or religion to have human rights. Included in the idea of universality is some conception of independent existence. People have human rights independently of whether such rights are present in the practices, morality, or law of their country or culture. This idea of universality needs several qualifications, however. First, some rights, such as the right to vote, are held only by adult citizens or residents and apply only to voting in one’s own country. Second, some rights can be suspended. For example, the human right to freedom of movement may be suspended temporarily during a riot or a wildfire. And third, some human rights treaties focus not on the rights of everyone but rather on the rights of specific groups such as minorities, women, indigenous peoples, and children.

Human rights have high-priority . Maurice Cranston held that human rights are matters of “paramount importance” and their violation “a grave affront to justice” (Cranston 1967: 51, 52). If human rights were not very important norms they would not have the ability to compete with other powerful considerations such as national stability and security, individual and national self-determination, and national and global prosperity. High priority does not mean, however, that human rights are absolute. As James Griffin says, human rights should be understood as “resistant to trade-offs, but not too resistant” (Griffin 2008: 77). Further, there seems to be priority variation among human rights. For example, the right to life is generally thought to have greater importance than the right to privacy; when the two conflict the right to privacy will generally be outweighed.

Let’s now consider four other features or functions that might be added to these four.

Should human rights be defined as inalienable? Inalienability does not mean that rights are absolute or can never be overridden by other considerations. Rather it means that its holder cannot lose it temporarily or permanently by bad conduct or by voluntarily giving it up. It is doubtful that all human rights are inalienable in this sense. One who endorses both human rights and imprisonment as punishment for serious crimes must hold that people’s rights to freedom of movement can be forfeited temporarily or permanently by just convictions of serious crimes. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that human rights are very hard to lose. (For a stronger view of inalienability, see Donnelly 1989 [2020] and Meyers 1985.)

Should human rights be defined as minimal rights? A number of philosophers have proposed the view that human rights are minimal in the sense of not being too numerous (a few dozen rights rather than hundreds or thousands), and not too demanding (see Joshua Cohen 2004 and Ignatieff 2004). Their views suggest that human rights are—or should be—more concerned with avoiding the worst than with achieving the best. Henry Shue suggests that human rights concern the “lower limits on tolerable human conduct” rather than “great aspirations and exalted ideals” (Shue 1996: ix). When human rights are modest standards they leave most legal and policy matters open to democratic decision-making at the national and local levels. This allows human rights to have high priority, to accommodate a great deal of cultural and institutional variation among countries, and to leave open a large space for democratic decision-making at the national level. Still, there is no contradiction in the idea of an extremely expansive list of human rights and hence minimalism is not a defining feature of human rights (for criticism of the view that human rights are minimal standards see Brems 2009; Etinson forthcoming; and Raz 2010). Minimalism is best seen as a normative prescription for what international human rights should be. Moderate forms of minimalism have considerable appeal as recommendations, but not as part of the definition of human rights.

Should human rights be defined as always being or “mirroring” moral rights? Philosophers coming to human rights theory from moral philosophy sometimes assume that human rights must be, at bottom, moral rather than legal rights. There is no contradiction, however, in people saying that they believe in human rights, but only when they are legal rights at the national or international levels. As Louis Henkin observed,

Political forces have mooted the principal philosophical objections, bridging the chasm between natural and positive law by converting natural human rights into positive legal rights. (Henkin 1978: 19)

It has also been suggested that legal human rights can be justified without directly appealing to any corresponding moral human right (see Buchanan 2013).

Should human rights be defined in terms of serving some sort of political function? Instead of seeing human rights as grounded in some sort of independently existing moral reality, a theorist might see them as the norms of a highly useful political practice that humans have constructed. Such a view would see the idea of human rights as playing various political roles at the national and international levels and as serving thereby to protect urgent human and national interests. These political roles might include providing standards for international evaluations of how governments treat their people and specifying when use of economic sanctions or military intervention is permissible. This kind of view may be plausible for the very salient international human rights that have emerged in international law and politics in the last fifty years. But human rights can exist and function in contexts not involving international scrutiny and intervention such as a world with only one state. Imagine, for example, that a massive asteroid strike makes New Zealand the only remaining state in existence. Surely the idea of human rights along with many dimensions of human rights practice could continue in New Zealand, even though there would be no international relations, law, or politics (for an argument of this sort see Tasioulas 2012a). And if in the same scenario a few people were discovered to have survived in Iceland and were living without a government or state, New Zealanders would know that human rights governed how these people should be treated even though they were stateless. How deeply the idea of human rights must be rooted in international law and practice should not be settled by definitional fiat. We can allow, however, that the sorts of political functions that Rawls and Beitz describe are typically served by international human rights today.

2 The Existence and Grounds of Human Rights

The most obvious way in which human rights exist is as norms of national and international law. At the international level, human rights norms exist because of treaties that have turned them into international law. For example, the human right not to be held in slavery or servitude in Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights and in Article 8 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights exists because these treaties establish it. At the national level, human rights norms exist because they have—through legislative enactment, judicial decision, or custom—become part of a country’s law. For example, the right against slavery exists in the United States because the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits slavery and servitude. When rights are embedded in international law, we are apt to speak of them as human rights; but when they are enacted in national law we more frequently describe them as civil or constitutional rights.

Although enactment in national and international law is one of the ways in which human rights exist, many have suggested that this is not the only way. If human rights exist only because of enactment, their availability is contingent on domestic and international political developments. Many people have looked for a way to support the idea that human rights have roots that are deeper and less subject to human decisions than legal enactment. One version of this idea is that people are born with rights, that human rights are somehow innate or inherent in human beings (see Morsink 2009). One way that a normative status could be inherent in humans is by being god-given. The American Declaration of Independence claims that people are “endowed by their Creator” with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On this view, god, the supreme lawmaker, enacted some basic human rights.

Rights plausibly attributed to divine decree must be very general and abstract (life, liberty, etc.) so that they can apply across thousands of years of human history, not just to recent centuries. But contemporary human rights are specific and many of them presuppose contemporary institutions (e.g., the right to a fair trial, the right to social security, and the right to education). Even if people are born with god-given natural rights, we need to explain how to get from those general and abstract rights to the specific rights found in contemporary declarations and treaties.

Attributing human rights to god’s commands may give them a secure status at the metaphysical level, but in a very diverse world it does not make them practically secure. Billions of people today do not believe in the god of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. If people do not believe in god, or in the sort of god that prescribes rights, then if you want to base human rights on theological beliefs you must persuade these people to accept a rights-supporting theological view. This is likely to be even harder than persuading them of human rights. Legal enactment at the national and international levels provides a far more secure status for practical purposes.

Human rights could also exist independently of legal enactment by being part of actual human moralities. All human groups seem to have moralities, that is, imperative norms of behavior backed by reasons and values. These moralities contain specific norms (for example, a prohibition on the intentional murder of innocent persons) and specific values (for example, valuing human life). One way in which human rights could exist apart from divine or human enactment is as norms accepted in almost all actual human moralities. If almost all human groups have moralities containing norms that prohibit murder, for example, these norms could constitute the human right to life.

This view is attractive but has serious difficulties. Although worldwide acceptance of human rights has increased in recent decades (see below section 4. Universal Human Rights in a World of Diverse Beliefs and Practices ), worldwide moral unanimity about human rights does not exist. Human rights declarations and treaties are intended to change existing norms, not just describe an existing moral consensus.

Yet another way of explaining the existence of human rights is to say that they exist most basically in true or justified ethical outlooks. On this account, to say that there is a human right against torture is mainly to assert that there are strong reasons for believing that it is always morally wrong to engage in torture and that protections should be provided against its practice. This approach would view the Universal Declaration as attempting to formulate a justified political morality: that is, as not merely trying to identify a preexisting moral consensus, but trying to create a consensus that could be supported by very plausible moral and practical reasons. This approach requires commitment to the objectivity of such reasons. It holds that just as there are reliable ways of finding out how the physical world works, or what makes buildings sturdy and durable, there are reliable ways of finding out what individuals may justifiably demand of each other and of governments. Even if unanimity about human rights is currently lacking, rational agreement is available to humans if they will commit themselves to open-minded and serious moral and political inquiry. If moral reasons exist independently of human construction, they can—when combined with premises about current institutions, problems, and resources—generate moral norms different from those currently accepted or enacted. The Universal Declaration seems to proceed on exactly this assumption (see Morsink 2009).

One problem with this view is that an existence based on good reasons seems a rather thin form of existence for human rights. But perhaps we can view this thinness as a practical rather than a theoretical problem—that is, as something to be remedied by the formulation and enactment of legal norms. The best form of existence for human rights would combine robust legal existence with the sort of moral existence that comes from being supported by strong moral and practical reasons.

Justifications for human rights should identify plausible starting points for defending the key features of human rights and offer an account of the transition from those starting points to a list of specific rights (see Nickel 2007). Further, justifying international human rights is likely to require additional steps (see Buchanan 2013). These requirements make the construction of a good justification a daunting task.

Recent attempts to justify human rights offer a dizzying variety of grounds. These include prudential reasons; linkage arguments (Shue 1996); agency and autonomy (Gewirth 1996; Griffin 2008); basic needs (D. Miller 2012); capabilities and positive freedom (Gould 2004; Nussbaum 2000; and Sen 2004) dignity (Gilabert 2018b; Kateb 2011, Tasioulas 2015); and fairness, status equality, and equal respect (Dworkin 2011; Buchanan 2013).

There is a lot of overlap between these approaches, but also important differences that are likely to make them yield different results. For example, an approach framed in terms of agency and autonomy will be more strongly and directly supportive of fundamental freedoms than one framed in terms of basic human needs. Justifications can be based on just one of these types of reasons or be pluralistic and appeal to several. Seeing so much diversity in philosophical approaches to justification may be discouraging (although great disagreement in approaches is common in philosophy) but its good side is that it suggests that there are at least several plausible ways of justifying human rights.

Philosophical justifications for human rights differ in how much credibility they attribute to contemporary lists of human rights, such as the one found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Some take fidelity to contemporary human rights practice as nearly imperative while others prioritize particular normative frameworks even if they can only justify some of the rights in contemporary lists.

Attempting to discuss all of these approaches would be a task for a large book, not an encyclopedic entry. The discussion here is limited to two approaches: agency/autonomy and dignity.

2.2.1 Agency and Autonomy

Grounding human rights in human agency and autonomy has had strong advocates in recent decades (Griffin 2008; Gould 2004). An important forerunner in this area was Alan Gewirth. In Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application (1982), Gewirth argued that human rights are indispensable conditions of a life as an agent who survives and acts. Abstractly described, the conditions of such a life are basic freedom and well-being. A prudent rational agent who must have freedom and well-being will assert a “prudential right claim” (1982: 31)to them. But, having demanded that others must respect her freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect the freedom and well-being of all other persons, too. She “logically must accept” (1982: 20) that other people as agents have equal rights to freedom and well-being. These two abstract rights work alone and together to generate a list of more determinate human rights of familiar sorts (Gewirth 1978, 1982, 1996). Gewirth’s argument generated a large critical literature (see Beyleveld 1991 and Boylan 1999).

A more recent attempt to base human rights on agency and autonomy is found in James Griffin’s book, On Human Rights (2008). Griffin does not share Gewirth’s goal of providing a logically inescapable argument for human rights, but his overall view shares key structural features with Gewirth’s. These include basing the justification on the unique value of agency and autonomy, postulating some abstract rights, and making place for a right to well-being within an agency-based approach.

In the current dispute between “moral” (or “orthodox”) and “political” conceptions of human rights, Griffin strongly sides with those who see human rights as fundamentally moral rights (on this debate see Liao & Etinson 2012). Their defining role, in Griffin’s view, is protecting people’s ability to form and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life—a capacity that Griffin variously refers to as “autonomy”, “normative agency”, and “personhood”. This ability to form, revise, and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life is taken to be of paramount value, the exclusive source of human dignity, and thereby the basis of human rights. Griffin holds that people value this capacity “especially highly, often more highly than even our happiness” (2008: 32 [§2.3])

“Practicalities” also shape human rights in Griffin’s view. He describes practicalities as “a second ground” (2008: 37–39 [§2.5]) of human rights. They prescribe making the boundaries of rights clear by avoiding “too many complicated bends” (2008: 37 [§2.5]), enlarging rights a little to give them safety margins, and consulting facts about human nature and the nature of society. Accordingly, the justifying generic function that Griffin assigns to human rights is protecting normative agency while taking account of practicalities.

Griffin thinks that he can explain the universality of human rights by recognizing that normative agency is a threshold concept—once one is above the threshold one has the same rights as everyone else. One’s degree of agency above the threshold does not matter. There are no “degrees of being a person” (2008: 67 [§3.5]) among competent adults. Treating agency in this way, however, is a normative policy, not just a fact about concepts. An alternative policy is possible, namely proportioning people’s rights to their level of normative agency. This is what we do with children; their rights grow as they develop greater agency and responsibility. To exclude proportional rights, and to explain the egalitarian dimensions of human rights, including their character as universal and equal rights to be enjoyed without discrimination, some additional ground pertaining to fairness and equality seems to be needed.

This last point raises the question of whether agency-based approaches in general can adequately account for the universality, equality, and anti-discriminatory character of human rights. The idea that human rights are to be respected and protected without discrimination seems to be most centrally a matter of fairness rather than one of agency, freedom, or welfare. Discrimination often harms and hinders its victims, but even when it doesn’t it is still deeply unfair. For example, human rights that explicitly refer to fair wages and equal pay for equal work (ICESCR Articles 3 and 7.i) seem to be much more about fairness than about agency, freedom, or welfare—particularly since human rights to a wage that ensures a decent standard of living are often mentioned separately (ICESCR Article 7.ii).

2.2.2 Dignity

Many human rights declarations and treaties invoke human dignity as the ground of human rights. In recent decades numerous books and articles have been published that advocate dignitarian approaches to justifying human rights (for example, Gilabert 2018b; Kateb 2014; McCrudden 2013 and the many essays therein; Tasioulas 2015; Waldron 2012 and 2015). There have also been many critics, including Den Hartogh 2014; Etinson 2020; Green 2010; Macklin 2003; Rosen 2012; and Sangiovanni 2017.

A well-worked out conception of human dignity is likely to have at least three parts. The first describes the nature of human dignity, specifying for example whether it is a kind of value, status, or virtue (see Rosen 2012). The second explains the grounds of human dignity—that is, why, or in virtue of which shared capacities or features we all have the sort of dignity described in the first step. Finally, and third, there is the question of human dignity’s practical requirements, or what is concretely involved in “respecting” it. (See the entry on dignity for a broader discussion.)

Human dignity is often understood as a special worth or status which all human beings share in contrast to other animals (e.g., Kateb 2011). We can call this the “Special Worth Thesis”. Attempts to provide good explanatory grounds for the Special Worth Thesis identify one or more valuable features that all human persons share and that non-human animals mostly do not possess or have at much lower levels. The valuable features identified will presumably once again need to be “threshold concepts”, so that people can vary in how much of the feature or capacity they have without thereby losing, lessening, or increasing their human dignity in comparison to other persons. Human dignity is, after all, supposed to be a strongly egalitarian idea. Plausible candidates for such grounds might include moral abilities (to understand and follow moral values and norms and to reason and act in terms of them); thought, imagination, and rationality; self-consciousness and reflective capacities; and the use of complicated language and technologies, among others.

One worry about the Special Worth Thesis is its self-glorifying character. In claiming special worth we humans seem to excuse our many faults—including a terrible capacity for evil, routinely evidenced in our behavior towards other humans and towards non-human animals (Rosen 2013). Another closely associated and increasingly prominent worry is that the Special Worth Thesis is speciesist, arbitrarily ranking the interests, status, and/or value of human beings above that/those of non-human animals (Kymlicka 2018; Meyer 2001). In the context of these reasonable concerns, it is worth noting that support for, or a belief in, human dignity need not be prejudicial towards non-human animals; one can affirm the dignity of homo sapiens while also affirming the equal dignity of other species and forms of life (Etinson 2020; Gilabert 2018b). The Special Worth Thesis is optional and only defended by some theorists.

What attitudes, actions, policies, and rights follow from the duty or reason to respect human dignity? And are human rights among them? The answer will at least in part depend on what we think human dignity is. If it is a kind of virtue shared or shareable by all persons then its practical requirements will include things like praising and/or admiring those who possess it, and perhaps developing or cultivating “dignitarian” dispositions in one’s own character. If human dignity is, by contrast, a kind of value or worth (as in Immanuel Kant’s famous understanding of dignity as a worth “beyond all price” Kant 1785/1996: 43), then it is something we have reason to protect, promote, preserve, cherish, restore and perhaps even maximize, if possible. The human right to life, and its material conditions, is an intuitive product of human dignity understood in this way. If, on the other hand, we think of human dignity as a kind of legal (Waldron 2012 and 2015), moral (Gilabert 2018b; Lee & George 2008), or social status (Etinson 2020; Killmister 2020), then duties of “respect” more naturally follow.

These options are not mutually exclusive. In principle, human dignity can refer to all of these things: value, status, and virtue. If human dignity yields human rights, however, this is going to depend on exactly how we understand its practical requirements in light of its nature and grounds. This practical elaboration is the workhorse of a conception of human dignity. It normally results in one or more general maxims or guidelines: e.g., not to humiliate or degrade, never to treat persons merely as a means, to treat others in justifiable ways, to avoid severe cruelty, to respect autonomy, etc. The prospect of grounding human rights in human dignity faces critical challenges at this juncture. As we saw in the preceding discussion of agency-based approaches, the more specific and singular one’s dignitarian maxim is, the less plausible it will be as an exhaustive ground for standard lists of human rights in all their variety. On the other hand, a pluralistic set of grounding maxims will make human dignity a better source of human rights, but it is unclear whether in doing so we are simply explaining its implicit content or bringing in other values and norms to fill in its indeterminate scope. This raises the possibility that values and norms such as promoting human welfare; agency/autonomy; and fairness partially constitute the idea of human dignity rather than being derived from it (see Macklin 2003).

3. Which Rights are Human Rights?

This section discusses the question of which rights belong on lists of human rights. The Universal Declaration’s list, which has been very influential, consists of six families:

• Security rights that protect people against murder, torture, and genocide;
• Due process rights that protect people against arbitrary and excessively harsh punishments and require fair and public trials for those accused of crimes;
• Liberty rights that protect people’s fundamental freedoms in areas such as belief, expression, association, and movement;
• Political rights that protect people’s liberty to participate in politics by assembling, protesting, voting, and serving in public office;
• Equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law, and freedom from discrimination; and
• Economic and social rights that require that governments to forbid slavery and forced labor, enforce safe working conditions, ensure to all the availability of work, education, health services, and a standard of living that is adequate.

A seventh category, minority and group rights, has been created by subsequent treaties. These rights protect women, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, children, migrant workers, and the disabled. This list of human rights seems normatively diverse: the issues addressed cover include security, liberty, fairness, equality before the law, access to work and good working conditions, unduly cruel treatment, and political participation.

In spite of the ample list above, not every question of social justice or wise governance is a human rights issue. For example, a country could have too many lawyers or inadequate provision for graduate-level education without violating any human rights. Deciding which norms should be counted as human rights is a matter of considerable difficulty. And there is continuing pressure to expand lists of human rights to include new areas. Many political movements would like to see their main concerns categorized as matters of human rights, since this would publicize, promote, and legitimize their concerns at the international level. A possible result of this is “human rights inflation”, the devaluation of human rights caused by producing too much bad human rights currency (see Cranston 1973; Orend 2002; Wellman 1995; Griffin 2008).

One way to avoid rights inflation is to follow Cranston in insisting that human rights only deal with extremely important goods, protections, and freedoms. A supplementary approach is to impose several justificatory tests for specific human rights. For example, it could be required that a proposed human right not only protect some very important good but also respond to one or more common and serious threats to that good (Dershowitz 2004; Donnelly 1989 [2003]; Shue 1996; Talbott 2005), impose burdens on the addressees that are justifiable and no larger than necessary, and be feasible in most of the world’s countries (on feasibility see Gheaus 2022; Gilabert 2009; Nickel 2007; and Richards 2023). This approach restrains rights inflation with several tests, not just one master test.

In deciding which norms should be considered human rights it is possible to make either too little or too much of international documents such as the Universal Declaration and the European Convention. One makes too little of them by proceeding as if drawing up a list of important rights were a new question, never before addressed, and as if there were no practical wisdom to be found in the choices of rights that went into the historic documents. And one makes too much of them by presuming that those documents tell us everything we need to know about human rights. This approach involves a kind of fundamentalism: it holds that when a right is on the official lists of human rights that settles its status as a human right (“If it’s in the book that’s all I need to know”.) But the process of identifying human rights in the United Nations and elsewhere was a political process with plenty of imperfections. There is little reason to take international diplomats as the most authoritative guides to which human rights there are. Further, even if a treaty’s ratification by most countries can settle the question of whether a certain right is a human right within international law, such a treaty cannot settle its weight. The treaty may suggest that the right is supported by weighty considerations, but it cannot make this so. If an international treaty enacted a right to visit national parks without charge as a human right, the ratification of that treaty would make free access to national parks a human right within international law, but it may well fail to persuade us that national park access is important enough to be a genuine human right.

The least controversial family of human rights is civil and political rights. These rights are familiar from historic bills of rights such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791, with subsequent amendments). Contemporary sources include the first 21 Articles of the Universal Declaration , and treaties such as the European Convention , the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , the American Convention on Human Rights , and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights . Some representative formulations follow:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing, in print, in the form of art, or through any other medium of one’s choice. ( American Convention on Human Rights , Article 13.1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. ( European Convention , Article 11) No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. (ICCPR Article 17)

Most civil and political rights are not absolute—they can sometimes be overridden by other considerations. For example, the right to freedom of movement can be restricted by public and private property rights, by restraining orders related to domestic violence, and by legal punishments. Further, after a disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake free movement is often appropriately suspended to keep out the curious, permit access of emergency vehicles and equipment, and prevent looting. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights permits most rights to be suspended during times “of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation” (ICCPR Article 4). But it excludes some rights from suspension including the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the prohibition of slavery, the prohibition of ex post facto criminal laws, and freedom of thought and religion.

The Universal Declaration included economic and social rights (“ESRs”) that address matters such as education, food, health services, and employment. Their inclusion has been the source of much controversy (see Beetham 1995). The European Convention did not include them (although it was later amended to include the right to education). Instead ESRs were put into a separate treaty, the European Social Charter . When the United Nations began the process of putting the rights of the Universal Declaration into international law, it followed the same pattern by placing ESRs in a treaty separate from the one dealing with civil and political rights. This treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), treated these standards as rights—albeit rights to be progressively realized.

The ICESCR includes rights to: freedom from slavery and forced labor; adequate income or services to cover food, water, clothing, and shelter; basic health conditions and services; free public education; freedom to work, choose one's occupation, and have adequate opportunities for remunerative employment; fair pay and safe conditions of work; social security; equality for women in the workplace, including equal pay for equal work; freedom to form trade unions and to strike; special protections for mothers and children; adequate rest and leisure; and nondiscrimination in respecting, protecting, and fulfilling these rights. In terms of underlying values and norms, some of these rights are welfare-oriented, others are fairness-oriented, and still others are freedom-oriented (Nickel 2022b).

Article 2.1 of the ICESCR sets out what each of the parties commits itself to do about this list, namely to

take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation…to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant.

In contrast, the Civil and Political Covenant commits its signatories to immediate compliance, to

respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory the rights recognized in the present Covenant. (ICCPR Article 2.1)

The contrast between these two levels of commitment has led some people to suspect that ESRs are really just valuable goals. For many countries, noncompliance due to inability would have been certain if these standards had been treated as immediately binding.

ESRs have often been defended with linkage arguments which claim that ESRs provide indispensable support to the realization of civil and political rights. This approach was first developed philosophically by Henry Shue. He argued that security and subsistence are so indispensable to the full realization of other rights that anyone who endorses the realization of any other right must also endorse ESRs (Shue 1980; for analysis and critical assessments of linkage arguments see Nickel 2007, 2016, and 2022a).

Do ESRs protect sufficiently important human interests? Maurice Cranston opposed ESRs by suggesting that they are mainly concerned with matters such as holidays with pay which are not of deep and universal human interest (Cranston 1967, 1973; treatments of objections to ESRs include Beetham 1995; Howard 1983; and Nickel 2007). It is far from the case, however, that most ESRs pertain only to superficial interests. Consider two examples: the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to free public education. The former requires governments to work hard at remedying widespread and serious evils such as severe poverty, starvation and malnutrition, and ignorance. The importance of food and other basic material conditions of life is easy to show. These goods are essential to people’s ability to live, function, and flourish. Without adequate access to these goods, interests in life, health, and liberty are endangered and serious illness and death are probable. The unavailability of educational opportunities typically limits (both absolutely and comparatively) people’s abilities to participate fully and effectively in the political and economic life of their county

Are ESRs too burdensome? Another objection to ESRs is that they are too burdensome on their dutybearers. It is very expensive to guarantee everyone basic education and minimal material conditions. Frequently the claim that ESRs are too burdensome suggests that ESRs are substantially more burdensome or expensive than liberty rights. Suppose, however, that we use as a basis of comparison liberty rights such as freedom of communication, association, and movement. These rights require both respect and protection from governments. And people cannot be adequately protected in their enjoyment of liberties such as these unless they also have security and due process rights. The costs of liberty, as it were, include the costs of law and criminal justice. Once we see this, liberty rights start to look a lot more costly.

Further, we need not generally think of ESRs as simply giving everyone a free supply of the goods they protect. Guarantees of things like food and housing may be intolerably expensive and undermine productivity if everyone simply receives a free supply. A viable system of ESRs can require most people to provide these goods for themselves and their families through work, as long as they are given the necessary opportunities, education, and infrastructure. Government-implemented ESRs provide guarantees of availability (or “secure access”), but under many conditions governments should only have to supply the requisite goods in a small fraction of cases.

Countries that do not accept and implement ESRs must still somehow bear the costs of providing for the needy since these countries are unlikely to find it tolerable to allow sizable parts of the population to starve and be homeless. If government does not supply food, clothing, and shelter to those unable to provide for themselves, then families, friends, and communities will have to shoulder this burden. It is only in the last hundred or so years that government-sponsored ESRs have taken over a substantial part of the burden of providing for the needy. The taxes associated with ESRs are partial replacements for other burdensome duties, namely the duties of families and communities to provide adequate care for the unemployed, sick, disabled, and aged. Deciding whether to implement ESRs is not a matter of deciding whether to bear such burdens, but rather of deciding whether to continue with total reliance on systems of informal provision that distribute assistance in a very spotty way and whose costs fall very unevenly on families, friends, and communities.

Are ESRs feasible worldwide? Another objection to ESRs alleges that they are not feasible in many countries (on feasibility see Gheaus 2013, Gilabert 2009, and Nickel 2007). It is very expensive to provide guarantees of subsistence, measures to protect and restore people’s health, and education. Many governments will be unable to provide these guarantees while meeting other important responsibilities. Rights are not magical sources of supply (Holmes & Sunstein 1999). As we saw earlier, the ESR Covenant dealt with the issue of feasibility by calling for progressive implementation, that is, implementation as financial and other resources permit. Does this view of implementation turn ESRs into high-priority goals? And if so, is that a bad thing?

Standards that outrun the abilities of many of their addressees are good candidates for treatment as goals. Viewing them as largely aspirational rather than as imposing immediate duties avoids problems of inability-based noncompliance. One may worry, however, that this is too much of a demotion for ESRs because goals seem much weaker than rights (see O’Neill 2005 and Tomalty 2014). But goals can be formulated in ways that make them more like rights. They can be assigned addressees (the parties who are to pursue the goal), beneficiaries, scopes that define the objective to be pursued, and a high level of priority (see Langford, Sumner, & Yamin 2013 and Nickel 2013; see also OHCHR and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN ). Strong reasons for the importance of these goals can be provided. And supervisory bodies can monitor levels of progress and pressure low-performing addressees to attend to and work on realizing their goals.

Treating very demanding rights as goals has some advantages. Goals coexist easily with low levels of ability to achieve them. And goals are flexible: addressees with different levels of ability can choose ways of pursuing the goals that suit their circumstances and means. Because of these attractions it may be worth exploring sophisticated ways to transform very demanding human rights into goals. The transformation may be full or partial. It is possible to create right-goal mixtures that contain some mandatory elements (see Brems 2009). A right-goal mixture might include some rights-like goals, some mandatory steps to be taken immediately, and duties to realize the rights-like goals as quickly as possible.

Do ESRs yield a sufficient commitment to equality? Objections to ESRs as human rights have come from both the political right and the political left. A common objection from the left, including liberal egalitarians and socialists, is that ESRs as enumerated in human rights documents and treaties provide too weak of a commitment to material equality (Gilabert 2018a and Moyn 2018). Realizing ESRs requires governments to ensure everyone an adequate minimum of resources in some key areas but does not require strong commitments to equality of opportunity, redistributive taxation, or wealth ceilings (see the entries on equality , distributive justice , and liberal feminism ).

The egalitarian objection cannot be that human rights documents and treaties show no concern for people living in poverty and misery. One of the main purposes of including ESRs in human rights documents and treaties was to promote serious efforts to combat poverty, lack of education, and unhealthy living conditions in countries all around the world (see also Langford, Sumner, & Yamin 2013 on the UN Millennium Development Goals). The objection also cannot be that human rights facilitated the hollowing out of systems of welfare rights in many developed countries that occurred after 1980 (for criticism of this view see Song 2019). Those cuts in welfare programs were often in violation of the requirements of realizing ESRs.

Perhaps it should be conceded that human rights documents and treaties have not said enough about positive measures to promote equal opportunity in education and work. A positive right to equal opportunity, like the one Rawls proposed, would require countries to take serious measures to reduce disparities between the opportunities effectively available to children of high-income and low-income parents (see Rawls 1971 and the entry on equality of opportunity ).

A strongly egalitarian political program is probably best pursued partially within but mostly beyond the human rights framework. One reason for this is that the human rights movement will have better prospects for ongoing acceptance and support if it has widespread political acceptance. To achieve this, the rights it endorses must appeal to people with a variety of political views, ranging from center-left to center-right. Support from the broad political center is less likely to emerge and survive if the human rights platform is perceived as mostly a leftist program.

Equality of rights for historically disadvantaged or subordinated groups is a longstanding concern of the human rights movement. Human rights documents repeatedly emphasize that all people, including women and members of minority ethnic and religious groups, have equal human rights and should be able to enjoy them without discrimination. The right to freedom from discrimination figures prominently in the Universal Declaration and subsequent treaties. The Civil and Political Covenant, for example, commits participating states to respect and protect their people’s rights without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or social status (ICCPR Article 2.1). On minority and group rights see Kymlicka 1995.

A number of standard civil and political rights are especially important to ethnic and religious minorities, including rights to freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom from discrimination. Human rights documents also include rights that refer to minorities explicitly and give them special protections. For example, the Civil and Political Covenant in Article 27 says that persons belonging to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities

shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language. (ICCPR Article 27)

Feminists have often protested that standard lists of human rights do not sufficiently take into account the unique risks faced by women. For example, issues like domestic violence, reproductive choice, and the trafficking of women and girls for sex work did not have a prominent place in early human rights documents and treaties. Lists of human rights have had to be expanded “to include the degradation and violation of women” (Bunch 2006; see also Okin 1998). Violations of women’s human rights often occur in the “private” sphere, i.e., in the home at the hands of other family members. This suggests that governments cannot be seen as the only addressees of human rights and that the right to privacy of home and family needs qualification to allow police to protect women within the home.

The issue of how formulations of human rights should respond to variations in the sorts of risks and dangers that different people face is difficult and arises not just in relation to gender but also in relation to age, race, sexual orientation, profession, political affiliation, religion, and personal interests. Due process rights, for example, are much more useful to young people (and particularly young men) than they are to older people since the latter are far less likely to run afoul of the criminal law.

Since 1964 the United Nations has mainly dealt with the rights of women and minorities through specialized treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2007). See also the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Specialized treaties allow international norms to address unique problems of particular groups such as assistance and care during pregnancy and childbearing in the case of women, custody issues in the case of children, and the loss of historic territories by indigenous peoples.

Minority groups are often targets of violence. Human rights norms call upon governments to refrain from such violence and to provide protections against it. This work is partly done by the right to life, which is a standard individual right. It is also done by the right against genocide which protects groups from attempts to destroy or decimate them. The Genocide Convention was one of the first human rights treaties after World War II. The right against genocide is clearly a group right. It is held by both individuals and groups and provides protection to groups as groups. It is largely negative in the sense that it requires governments and other agencies to refrain from destroying groups; but it also requires that legal and other protections against genocide be created at the national level.

As a group right, can the right against genocide be a human right? More generally, can a group right fit the general idea of human rights as rights of individual persons proposed earlier? Perhaps it can if we broaden our conception of who can hold human rights to include important groups that people form and cherish (see the entry on group rights ). This can be made more palatable, perhaps, by recognizing that the beneficiaries of the right against genocide are individual humans who enjoy greater security against attempts to destroy the group to which they belong (Kymlicka 1989).

Although contemporary lists of human rights are already long, there are doubtless norms that should be counted as human rights but are not generally recognized as such. After all, there are lots of areas in which people’s basic welfare, dignity, and fundamental interests are threatened by the actions and omissions of individuals and governments. New technologies create new problems and require us to rethink old solutions. And new political movements emerge and create demands for their goals and norms as human rights.

Prominent recent proposals of new human rights include Kimberley Brownlee’s advocacy of a right against social deprivation that would address severe unwanted loneliness (Brownlee 2020 and 2022), the proposal of a universal right to internet access that was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2016 (UN Resolution 32/13), and the similar endorsement in 2022 of a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (UN Resolution 76/300; see also the entry on environmental ethics ).

The right to a healthy environment provides a good example of how new human rights can slowly emerge. After a right of this sort was added to many national bills of rights, environmental NGOs began to promote it within international organizations. In 2000 the European Union’s Bill of Rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union , included in Article 37 an environmental protection norm:

A high level of environmental protection and the improvement of the quality of the environment must be integrated into the policies of the Union and ensured in accordance with the principle of sustainable development.

In 2012 the UN Human Rights Council created a Special Rapporteur (independent expert) on the Environment, eventually approved the right to “a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment”, and forwarded it to the General Assembly—where 80 percent of the world’s countries voted for it (UN Resolution 76/300). Human rights approaches to climate change have also been developed in recent decades (see Bodansky 2009; Caney 2009; Gardiner 2013; and Vanderheiden 2008).

Worries about the proliferation of human rights have not disappeared. Lawyers and international organizations have proposed standards to limit the introduction of new human rights (for example, Alston 1984 and the UN General Assembly 1986). And human rights treaty-making has slowed. After the approval of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1999, the only human rights treaty approved by the UN is the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In 2007 a declaration (not a treaty) on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was approved by the General Assembly. Prominent philosophers have also advocated smaller lists of human rights (see, for example, Cranston 1967 and 1973; Rawls 1999; and Griffin 2008). Griffin also opposed squeezing new content into existing human rights—which he described as the “ballooning” of rights.

Two familiar philosophical worries about human rights are that they are based on beliefs and attitudes that are culturally relative and that their creation and advocacy involves ethnocentrism. Human rights prescribe universal standards in areas such as security, law enforcement, equality, political participation, and education. The peoples and countries of planet Earth are, however, enormously varied in their practices, traditions, religions, and levels of economic and political development. Putting these two propositions together may be enough to justify the worry that universal human rights do not sufficiently accommodate the diversity of Earth’s peoples. A theoretical expression of this worry is “relativism”, the idea that ethical, political, and legal standards are only true or justified relative to the traditions, beliefs, and conditions of a particular country, culture or region (see the entry on moral relativism ).

During the drafting in 1947 of the Universal Declaration, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (“AAA”) warned of the danger that the Declaration would be “a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in Western Europe and America”. A central concern of the AAA Board in the period right after World War II was to condemn intolerant colonialist attitudes of the day and to advocate cultural and political self-determination. But the Board also made the stronger assertion that “standards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive” and thus “what is held to be a human right in one society may be regarded as anti-social by another people” (AAA 1947).

Such assertions have continued to fuel accusations that human rights are instruments of ethnocentrism, arrogance, and cultural imperialism (Renteln 1990). Ethnocentrism is the assumption, usually unconscious, that “one’s own group is the center of everything” and that its beliefs, practices, and norms provide the standards by which other groups are “scaled and rated” (Sumner 1906; see also Etinson 2018a who argues that ethnocentrism is best understood as a kind of cultural bias rather than a belief in cultural superiority). Ethnocentrism can lead to arrogance and intolerance in dealings with other countries, ethical systems, and religions. Finally, cultural imperialism occurs when the economically, technologically, and militarily strongest countries impose their beliefs, values, and institutions on the rest of the world (for a useful discussion of several power-related concerns about human rights, see Gilabert 2018a).

As in the AAA Board’s case, relativists often combine these charges with a prescription, namely that tolerance of varied practices and traditions ought to be instilled and practiced through measures that include extended learning about other cultures. The idea that relativism and exposure to other cultures promote tolerance may be correct from a psychological perspective. People who are sensitive to differences in beliefs, practices, and traditions, and who are suspicious of the grounds for extending norms across borders, may be more inclined to be tolerant of other countries and peoples than those who believe in an objective universal morality. Still, philosophers have been generally critical of attempts to argue from relativism to a prescription of tolerance (see Williams 1972 [1993] and Talbott 2005). If the culture and religion of one country has long fostered intolerant attitudes and practices, and if its citizens and officials act intolerantly towards people from other countries, they are simply following their own traditions and cultural norms. Accordingly, a relativist from a tolerant country will be hard-pressed to find a basis for criticizing the citizens and officials of the intolerant country. To do so the relativist will have to endorse a transcultural principle of tolerance and to advocate as an outsider cultural change in the direction of greater tolerance. Because of this, relativists who are deeply committed to tolerance may find themselves attracted to a qualified commitment to human rights.

Perhaps for these reasons, relativism is not the stance of most anthropologists today. Currently the AAA has a central Committee whose objectives include promoting, protecting, and developing an anthropological perspective on human rights. While still emphasizing the importance of cultural differences, anthropologists now often support the protection of vulnerable cultures, non-discrimination, and the rights and land claims of indigenous peoples (see the AAA’s 2020 Statement on Anthropology and Human Rights).

The conflict between relativists and human rights advocates may be partially based on differences in their underlying philosophical beliefs, particularly in metaethics. Relativists are often subjectivists or noncognitivists and think of morality as entirely socially constructed and transmitted. In contrast, philosophically-inclined human rights advocates are more likely to adhere to or presuppose cognitivism, moral realism, and intuitionism.

As the AAA’s 1947 Statement shows, the accommodation of diversity has been a concern facing the contemporary human rights regime since its inception. As part of a 1946–47 UNESCO inquiry into the theoretical basis of human rights, the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, famously suggested that universal agreement on human rights was possible so long as questions of underlying justification were ignored: “Yes… we agree about the rights but on condition no one asks us why” (Maritain 1949: 9). The International Bill of Human Rights appears to violate this embargo when it asserts, in the Preamble to both major Covenants, that “these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person”. Nonetheless, Maritain’s idea has strong echoes in contemporary philosophical work (see Taylor 1999), including John Rawls’ idea that human rights can have a minimal public or “political” justification which may be accepted from various “comprehensive” religious, moral, and philosophical points of view (Rawls 1999; Beitz 2009). Indeed, some have argued that international human rights law’s justificatory appeal to human dignity should be understood in precisely this ecumenical way (McCrudden 2008).

Other important methods of accommodating diversity include the abstract formulation of human rights norms, which allows for diverse, context-sensitive modes of social and institutional implementation (see Etinson 2013). As discussed in section 1 , a modest understanding of the aims of human rights would leave more room for democratic decision-making at the domestic level, and for cultural and political variation across countries (see also the European Court of Human Rights’ notion of a “margin of appreciation”, discussed in Letsas 2006). And it is worth noting that, within limits, state parties to international human rights treaties are entitled to submit “reservations” that alter the legal effect of treaty provisions as they pertain to that state. This provides a further avenue for legal variation and accommodation.

In the 1990s, Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and others argued that international human rights as found in United Nations declarations and treaties were insensitive to distinctive “Asian values”, such as prizing families and community (in contrast to strong individualism); putting social harmony over personal freedom; respect for political leaders and institutions; and emphasizing responsibility, hard work, and thriftiness as means of social progress (on the Asian Values debate see Bauer & Bell [eds] 1999; Bell 2000; and Sen 1997). Proponents of the Asian values idea did not wish to abolish all human rights; they rather wanted to deemphasize some families of human rights, particularly the fundamental freedoms and rights of democratic participation (and in some cases the rights of women). They also wanted Western governments and NGOs to stop criticizing them for human rights violations in these areas.

At the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, countries including Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Iran advocated accommodations within human rights practice for cultural and economic differences. Western representatives tended to view the position of these countries as excuses for repression and authoritarianism. The Conference responded by approving the Vienna Declaration . It included in Article 5 the assertion that countries should not pick and choose among human rights:

All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

In recent decades widespread acceptance of human rights has occurred in most parts of the world. Three quarters of the world’s countries have ratified the major human rights treaties, and many countries in Africa, the Americas, and Europe participate in regional human rights regimes that have international courts (see the Georgetown University Human Rights Law Research Guide in the Other Internet Resources below). Ratification does not, of course, guarantee compliance. Further, all of the world’s countries now use similar political institutions (law, courts, legislatures, executives, militaries, bureaucracies, police, prisons, taxation, and public schools) and these institutions carry with them characteristic problems and abuses (Donnelly 1989 [2020]). Finally, globalization has diminished the differences among peoples. Today’s world is not the one that early anthropologists and missionaries found. National and cultural boundaries are breached not just by international trade but also by millions of travelers and migrants, electronic communications, international law covering many areas, and the efforts of international governmental and non-governmental organizations. International influences and organizations are everywhere and countries borrow freely and regularly from each other’s inventions and practices.

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• Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR), adopted 7 December 2007, came into force 1 December 2009. [ Fundamental Rights available online ]
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proclaimed 10 December 1948. [ UDHR available online ]
• International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted 21 December 1965. [ available online ]
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted 16 December 1966. ICCPR available online ]
• International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted 16 December 1966. [ ICESCR available online ]
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted 1979. [ CEDAW available online ]
• Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted 20 November 1989. [ CRC available online ]
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted 13 December 2006, opened for signing 2007. [ CRPD available online ]
• Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP), adopted 13 September 2007. [ DRIP available online ]
• A/RES/76/300 The human right to a clean, healthy and substainable environment, adopted 28 July 2022. [ A/RES/76/300 available online (pdf) ]
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, came into force 1 July 2002. [ Rome Statute available online ]
• Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted 25 June 1993, World Conference of Human Rights in Vienna. [ Vienna Declaration 1993 available online ]
• United States Constitution
• Declaration of Independence (United States), July 1776. US Declaration of Independence available online
• American Convention on Human Rights (Pact of San José), adopted 22 November 1969, came into force 18 July 1978. [ American Convention on Human Rights available online ]
• African (Banjul) Charter on Human and People’s Rights, adopted 27 June 1981, came into force 21 October 1986. [ African Charter available online (pdf) ]

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The International (UN) Human Rights System , Georgetown Law Library Human Rights Law Research Guide
• International Human Rights Law , United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
• Human Rights entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

democracy | dignity | equality | equality: of opportunity | ethics: environmental | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | globalization | justice: distributive | Kant, Immanuel | Locke, John: political philosophy | moral relativism | moral status, grounds of | Pufendorf, Samuel Freiherr von: moral and political philosophy | Rawls, John | respect | rights | rights: group | rights: of children | social minimum [basic income] | well-being

Acknowledgments

For the 2024 update, Adam Etinson has joined James Nickel in authoring and revising this entry.

Copyright © 2024 by James Nickel < nickel @ law . miami . edu > Adam Etinson < ae45 @ st-andrews . ac . uk >

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• Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 ( General Assembly resolution 217 A ) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages . The UDHR is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels (all containing references to it in their preambles). 

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,

The General Assembly,

Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. 

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

• Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
• No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
• Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
• Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
• This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
• Everyone has the right to a nationality.
• No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
• Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
• Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
• The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
• Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
• No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
• No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
• Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
• Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
• The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

• Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

• Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
• Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
• Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
• Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
• Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
• Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

• Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
• In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
• These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

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2023: UDHR turns 75

What is the Declaration of Human Rights? Narrated by Morgan Freeman.

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Women delegates from various countries played a key role in getting women’s rights included in the Declaration. Hansa Mehta of India (standing above Eleanor Roosevelt) is widely credited with changing the phrase "All men are born free and equal" to "All human beings are born free and equal" in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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June 2004  

What are Human Rights?

Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are considered entitled: the right to life, liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equal treatment before the law, among others. These rights represent entitlements of the individual or groups vis-B-vis the government, as well as responsibilities of the individual and the government authorities.

Such rights are ascribed "naturally," which means that they are not earned and cannot be denied on the basis of race, creed, ethnicity or gender.[1] These rights are often advanced as legal rights and protected by the rule of law. However, they are distinct from and prior to law, and can be used as standards for formulating or criticizing both local and international law . It is typically thought that the conduct of governments and military forces must comply with these standards.

Various "basic" rights that cannot be violated under any circumstances are set forth in international human rights documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights . The rights established by these documents include economic, social, cultural, political and civil rights.[2]

While human rights are not always interpreted similarly across societies, these norms nonetheless form a common human rights vocabulary in which the claims of various cultures can be articulated. The widespread ratification of international human rights agreements such as those listed above is taken as evidence that these are widely shared values.[3] Having human rights norms in place imposes certain requirements on governments and legitimizes the complaints of individuals in those cases where fundamental rights and freedoms are not respected.[4] Such norms constitute a standard for the conduct of government and the administration of force. They can be used as "universal, non-discriminatory standards" for formulating or criticizing law and act as guidelines for proper conduct.[5]

Many conflicts are sparked by a failure to protect human rights, and the trauma that results from severe human rights violations often leads to new human rights violations. As conflict intensifies, hatred accumulates and makes restoration of peace more difficult. In order to stop this cycle of violence, states must institute policies aimed at human rights protection. Many believe that the protection of human rights "is essential to the sustainable achievement of the three agreed global priorities of peace , development and democracy ."[6] Respect for human rights has therefore become an integral part of international law and foreign policy. The specific goal of expanding such rights is to "increase safeguards for the dignity of the person."[7]

Despite what resembles a widespread consensus on the importance of human rights and the expansion of international treaties on such matters, the protection of human rights still often leaves much to be desired. Although international organizations have been created or utilized to embody these values, there is little to enforce the commitments states have made to human rights. Military intervention is a rare occurrence. Sanctions have a spotty track record of effectiveness. Although not to be dismissed as insignificant, often the only consequence for failing to protect human rights is "naming and shaming."

Interventions to Protect Human Rights

To protect human rights is to ensure that people receive some degree of decent, humane treatment. Because political systems that protect human rights are thought to reduce the threat of world conflict, all nations have a stake in promoting worldwide respect for human rights.[8] International human rights law, humanitarian intervention law and refugee law all protect the right to life and physical integrity and attempt to limit the unrestrained power of the state. These laws aim to preserve humanity and protect against anything that challenges people's health, economic well-being, social stability and political peace. Underlying such laws is the principle of nondiscrimination, the notion that rights apply universally.[9]

Responsibility to protect human rights resides first and foremost with the states themselves. However, in many cases public authorities and government officials institute policies that violate basic human rights. Such abuses of power by political leaders and state authorities have devastating effects, including genocide , war crimes and crimes against humanity. What can be done to safeguard human rights when those in power are responsible for human rights violations ? Can outside forces intervene in order to protect human rights?

Humanitarian Intervention

In some cases, the perceived need to protect human rights and maintain peace has led to humanitarian intervention. There is evidence that internationally we are moving towards the notion that governments have not only a negative duty to respect human rights, but also a positive duty to safeguard these rights, preserve life and protect people from having their rights violated by others.[10] Many believe that states' duties to intervene should not be determined by proximity, but rather by the severity of the crisis.

There are two kinds of humanitarian intervention involving the military: unilateral interventions by a single state, and collective interventions by a group of states.[11] Because relatively few states have sufficient force and capacity to intervene on their own, most modern interventions are collective. Some also argue that there is a normative consensus that multilateral intervention is the only acceptable form at present.[12]

There is much disagreement about when and to what extent outside countries can engage in such interventions. More specifically, there is debate about the efficacy of using military force to protect the human rights of individuals in other nations. This sort of debate stems largely from a tension between state sovereignty and the rights of individuals.

Some defend the principles of state sovereignty and nonintervention, and argue that other states must be permitted to determine their own course. They point out that the principles of state sovereignty and the non-use of force are enshrined in the charter of the United Nations , which is regarded as an authoritative source on international legal order.[13]

This argument suggests that different states have different conceptions of justice, and international coexistence depends on a pluralist ethic whereby each state can uphold its own conception of the good.[14] Among this group, there is "a profound skepticism about the possibilities of realizing notions of universal justice."[15] States that presume to judge what counts as a violation of human rights in another nation interfere with that nation's right to self-determination. Suspicions are further raised by the inconsistent respect for sovereignty (or human rights for that matter); namely, the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council have tremendous say over application of international principles. In addition, requiring some country to respect human rights is liable to cause friction and can lead to far-reaching disagreements.[16] Thus, acts of intervention may disrupt interstate order and lead to further conflict.[17] Even greater human suffering might thereby result if states set aside the norm of nonintervention.

Others point out that humanitarian intervention does not, in principle, threaten the territorial integrity and political independence of states. Rather than aiming to destabilize a target state and meddle in its affairs, humanitarian intervention aims to restore rule of law and promote humane treatment of individuals.[18]

Furthermore, people who advocate this approach maintain that "only the vigilant eye of the international community can ensure the proper observance of international standards, in the interest not of one state or another but of the individuals themselves."[19] They maintain that massive violations of human rights, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, warrant intervention, even if it causes some tension or disagreement. Certain rights are inalienable and universal, and "taking basic rights seriously means taking responsibility for their protection everywhere."[20]

If, through its atrocious actions, a state destroys the lives and rights of its citizens, it temporarily forfeits its claims to legitimacy and sovereignty.[21] Outside governments then have a positive duty to take steps to protect human rights and preserve lives. In addition, it is thought that political systems that protect human rights reduce the threat of world conflict.[22] Thus, intervention might also be justified on the ground of preserving international security, promoting justice and maintaining international order.

Nevertheless, governments are often reluctant to commit military forces and resources to defend human rights in other states.[23] In addition, the use of violence to end human rights violations poses a moral dilemma insofar as such interventions may lead to further loss of innocent lives.[24] Therefore, it is imperative that the least amount of force necessary to achieve humanitarian objectives be used, and that intervention not do more harm than good. Lastly, there is a need to ensure that intervention is legitimate, and motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns. The purposes of intervention must be apolitical and disinterested. However, if risks and costs of intervention are high, it is unlikely that states will intervene unless their own interests are involved.[25] For this reason, some doubt whether interventions are ever driven by humanitarian concerns rather than self-interest.

Many note that in order to truly address human rights violations, we must strive to understand the underlying causes of these breaches. These causes have to do with underdevelopment, economic pressures, social problems and international conditions.[26] Indeed, the roots of repression, discrimination and other denials of human rights stem from deeper and more complex political, social and economic problems. It is only by understanding and ameliorating these root causes and strengthening both democracy and civil society that we can truly protect human rights.

Restoring Human Rights in the Peacebuilding Phase

In the aftermath of conflict, violence and suspicion often persist. Government institutions and the judiciary, which bear the main responsibility for the observation of human rights, are often severely weakened by the conflict or complicit in it. Yet, a general improvement in the human rights situation is essential for rehabilitation of war-torn societies. Many argue that healing the psychological scars caused by atrocities and reconciliation at the community level cannot take place if the truth about past crimes is not revealed and if human rights are not protected. To preserve political stability, human rights implementation must be managed effectively. Issues of mistrust and betrayal must be addressed, and the rule of law must be restored. In such an environment, the international community can often play an important supporting role in providing at least implicit guarantees that former opponents will not abandon the peace.[27] Because all international norms are subject to cultural interpretation, external agents that assist in the restoration of human rights in post-conflict societies must be careful to find local terms with which to express human rights norms. While human rights are in theory universal, ideas about which basic needs should be guaranteed vary according to cultural, political, economic and religious circumstances. Consequently, policies to promote and protect human rights must be culturally adapted to avoid distrust and perceptions of intrusion into internal affairs.

To promote human rights standards in post-conflict societies, many psychological issues must be addressed. Societies must either introduce new social norms or reestablish old moral standards. They must design programs that will both address past injustice and prevent future human rights violations . Human rights must not become just another compartmentalized aspect of recovery, but must be infused throughout all peacebuilding and reconstruction activities. Democratization implies the restoration of political and social rights. Government officials and members of security and police forces have to be trained to observe basic rights in the execution of their duties. Finally, being able to forgive past violations is central to society's reconciliation .

Rights Protection Methods

Various methods to advance and protect human rights are available:

• During violent conflict, safe havens to protect refugees and war victims from any surrounding violence in their communities can sometimes help to safeguard human lives.
• As violent conflict begins to subside, peacekeeping strategies to physically separate disputants and prevent further violence are crucial. These measures, together with violence prevention mechanisms, can help to safeguard human lives. Limiting the use of violence is crucial to ensuring groups' survival and creating the necessary conditions for a return to peace.
• Education about human rights must become part of general public education. Technical and financial assistance should be provided to increase knowledge about human rights. Members of the police and security forces have to be trained to ensure the observation of human rights standards for law enforcement. Research institutes and universities should be strengthened to train lawyers and judges. To uphold human rights standards in the long-term, their values must permeate all levels of society.
• Dialogue groups that assemble people from various ethnicities should be organized to overcome mistrust, fear and grief in society. Getting to know the feelings of ordinary people of each side might help to change the demonic image of the enemy group. Dialogue also helps parties at the grassroots level to discover the truth about what has happened, and may provide opportunities for apology and forgiveness.
• External specialists can offer legislative assistance and provide guidance in drafting press freedom laws, minority legislation and laws securing gender equality. They can also assist in drafting a constitution, which guarantees fundamental political and economic rights.
• Those who perpetrate human rights violations find it much easier to do so in cases where their activities can remain secret. International witnesses , observers and reporters can exert modest pressure to bring violations of human rights to public notice and discourage further violence. Monitors should not only expose violations, but also make the public aware of any progress made in the realization of human rights. In order to ensure that proper action is taken after the results of investigations have been made public, effective mechanisms to address injustice must be in place.
• Truth commissions are sometimes established after a political transition. To distinguish them from other institutions established to deal with a legacy of human rights abuses, truth commissions can be understood as "bodies set up to investigate a past history of violations of human rights in a particular country -- which can include violations by the military or other government forces or armed opposition forces."[28] They are officially sanctioned temporary bodies that investigate a pattern of abuse in the past. Their goal is to uncover details of past abuses as a symbol of acknowledgment of past wrongs. They typically do not have the powers of courts, nor should they, since they do not have the same standards of evidence and protections for defendants. As such, they usually do not "name names" of those responsible for human rights abuses, but rather point to institutional failings that facilitated the crimes. Finally, they conclude with a report that contains recommendations to prevent a recurrence of the crimes and to provide reparations to victims.
• International war crimes tribunals are established to hold individuals criminally responsible for violations of international human rights law in special courts. The international community rarely has the will to create them. As the experiences with the war tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia indicate, even where they are created, they are imperfect. They cannot hold all perpetrators accountable and typically aim for the top leadership. However, it remains difficult to sentence the top-level decision-makers, who bear the ultimate responsibility for atrocities. They often enjoy political immunity as members of the post-conflict government. Incriminating a popular leader might lead to violent protests and sometimes even to relapse into conflict. Leaders may be necessary to negotiate and implement a peace agreement.
• Various democratization measures can help to restore political and social rights. For sustainability and long-term viability of human rights standards, strong local enforcement mechanisms have to be established. An independent judiciary that provides impartial means and protects individuals against politically influenced persecution must be restored. Election monitors who help to guarantee fair voting procedures can help to ensure stable and peaceful elections. And various social structural changes , including reallocations of resources, increased political participation , and the strengthening of civil society can help to ensure that people's basic needs are met.
• Humanitarian aid and development assistance seeks to ease the impact that violent conflict has on civilians. During conflict, the primary aim is to prevent human casualties and ensure access to basic survival needs. These basics include water, sanitation, food, shelter and health care. Aid can also assist those who have been displaced and support rehabilitation work. Once conflict has ended, development assistance helps to advance reconstruction programs that rebuild infrastructure, institutions and the economy. This assistance helps countries to undergo peaceful development rather than sliding back into conflict.

The expansion of international human rights law has often not been matched by practice. Yet, there is growing consensus that the protection of human rights is important for the resolution of conflict and to the rebuilding process afterward. To achieve these goals, the international community has identified a number of mechanisms both to bring an end to human rights abuses and to establish an environment in which they will be respected in the future. They are not alternatives, but each provides important benefits in dealing with the past and envisioning a brighter future.

[1] Little, David. "Universality of Human Rights," [available at: http://www.usip.org/research/rehr/universality.html ] (no longer available as of March 5th 2013)

[2] endnote goes here**

[3] At the same time, some would argue that the hegemonic power of the West, whether through normative pressure or economic, is responsible for widespread ratification.

[4] Antonio Cassese, Human Rights in a Changing World . (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 2.

[5] Little, "The Nature and Basis of Human Rights," United States Institute of Peace.

[available at: http://www.usip.org/research/rehr/natbasis.html ] (no longer available as of March 5th 2013)

[6] "Human Rights Today: A United Nations Priority," The United Nations, 2000. [available at: http://www.un.org/rights/HRToday/ ]

[7] Cassese, 3.

[8] Cassese, 58.

[9] Don Hubert and Thomas G. Weiss et al. The Responsibility to Protect: Supplementary Volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. (Canada: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 144.

[10] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 147.

[11] Kithure Kindiki, "Gross Violations of Human Rights in Internal Armed Conflicts in Africa: Is There a Right of Humanitarian Intervention?" in Conflict Trends , no. 3, 2001. ACCORD.

[12] Martha Finnemore, The purpose of intervention: changing beliefs about the use of force . (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003), chapter 3.

[13] Kithure Kindiki, "Gross Violations of Human Rights"

[14] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 132.

[15] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 133.

[16] Cassese, 58.

z[17] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 133.

[18] Kithure Kindiki, "Gross Violations of Human Rights"

[19] Cassese, 55-6.

[20] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 135.

[21] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 136.

[22] Cassese, 58.

[23] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 136.

[24] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 137.

[25] Hubert and Weiss, et al., 141.

[26] Cassese, 59.

[27] See for example, Barbara F. Walter, Committing to peace: the successful settlement of civil wars . (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press: 2002).

[28] Priscilla B. Hayner, (1994). "Fifteen Truth Commissions - 1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study." Human Rights Quarterly. 16(4): 604.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Human Rights Protection." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: June 2004 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/human-rights-protect >.

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Perspectives on Human Rights

Jorge I. Dominguez, Nigel S. Rodley, Bryce Wood, and Richard Falk, Enhancing Global Human Rights, McGraw-Hill, 1979 – by M.J. Peterson. Originally published in the HIR September 1980 Issue.

Anyone who wants to learn about the international protection of human rights by reading one book should not read this one. Anyone with greater interest in the subject should read it selectively. It is not a comprehensive guide to the human rights problems of this decade; it is a collection of essays written for the Council of Foreign Relations's "1980s Project." The project is an effort to identify and consider issues that will require broad international action in the 1980s, and human rights was one of the ten issues listed. This listing may well be more significant than the contents of this or any subsequent Council volume on human rights because it puts an influential organization not considered particularly interested in the issue on the record as saying it is important.

Enhancing respect for human rights requires three things: definition of standards for governmental (and, when relevant, private) conduct, comparison of actual conduct to the standards, and ensurance of compliance with the standards by appropriate rewards or punishments. The international community has made some progress on the first and second; the authors mainly address the second and third. Jorge Dominguez, professor of Government at Harvard. and Nigel Rodley, legal adviser to Amnesty International, address problems of monitoring compliance while Richard Falk, professor of International Studies at Princeton, and Bryce Wood, retired member of the American Council of Learned Societies, discuss problems of ensuring it.

In "Assessing Human Rights Conditions," Dominguez proposes a comprehensive method for comparing state conduct against internationally accepted standards. He adopts as standards the definitions of rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) because they are the most widely accepted (even though the declaration is a non-binding U.N. General Assembly resolution) and the most inclusive. This means that he is interested in all types of rights - dignity of the person, civil and political, and economic social and cultural.

He mentions the problems of creating precise quantitative measures, but leaves them to those more qualified in the necessary methodologies. Instead, he marks off the broad categories in a 32-box matrix of eight rows and four columns. The rows are clusters of rights (not single rights) grouped under Harold Lasswell's and Abraham Kaplan's concepts of enlightenment, skill, respect, power, well-being, wealth, affection, and rectitude (pp. 35-39).

The columns contain Dominguez's analytical contribution, four distinct measures of enjoyment of rights: security, growth, equality, and liberty. "Security" refers to the likelihood that respect for rights will remain at the present level; "growth" to the expansion of respect to include more rights; "equality" to the extent to which all persons in the society can obtain and exercise rights; and "liberty" to the relative freedom of all persons to develop and act according to their own personalities (p. 34). Liberty seems an elusive concept. Dominguez asserts that it can be assessed for all clusters of rights, but never gives a clear example of how this would be done. Further, it seems particularly difficult to measure quantitatively.

After a short discussion of some of the moral, political, and methodological problems involved, Dominguez demonstrates how his scheme would work by comparing the human rights records of Cuba and Mexico, and then by describing quantitative measures already developed for assessing the extent of slavery, torture, political imprisonment, and infant mortality (as an index for denial of basic subsistence rights). Both discussions display a sure grasp of the problems of assessment, such as the difficulty of making comparisons of two countries at different stages of development or the unevenness or unreliability of information.

Rodley's "Monitoring Human Rights Violations in the 1980s" proposes the creation of a new agency to monitor respect for human rights systematically. Though

interesting, the proposal seems unlikely to be adopted. It is also incomplete in that the agency would deal only with civil and political rights. Rodley asserts that international financial institutions have the information necessary to monitor respect for social, economic, and cultural rights, and therefore can perform that task for the international community. However, they lack the complete independence from governments and political or economic elites that Rodley insists is essential for monitoring the situation regarding civil and political rights, and Rodley never shows that a similar independence is unnecessary in the economic, social, and cultural realms as well.

Enforcing Human Rights

Falk's "Responding to Severe Violations" addresses one problem of ensuring compliance, the structure of the existing state system. Readers unfamiliar with his work on the World Order Models Project will have difficulty understanding why he includes "ecocide" and "war crimes" (a term he defines more broadly than most writers on the subject) as "severe violations of human rights," or why he is so certain that a new international system based on global community must replace the current state system before the end of the century.

Falk discredits his advocacy of global community by using the crudest sort of straw-man tactics. First, he posits two alternative futures for the state system: the "hard state hypothesis" of an increase in governmental power that will insulate the state from external criticism and pressure, that will allow further disregard for human rights, and the "moderate state hypothesis" of a decrease in international and domestic tensions that allows less repressive governance. By rejecting the latter out of hand, Falk can compare his ideal to the state system at its worst and, of course, reject the state system (pp. 247-53). The exercise is unlikely to persuade those who believe the future of the state system is less bleak and/or those who believe that "Murphy's Law" will continue to work in any future system.

However, the discussion of inhibitions to effective action against governments practicing massive violations of human rights (pp. 231-41) is sensitive to the problems involved, though unsympathetic with failure to act. Anyone interested in the problem of unilateral intervention to stop massive violations of human rights should read this section carefully.

Although Wood discusses "Human Rights Issues in Latin America," his essay focuses mainly on the problems of ensuring respect for human rights.He begins with a theory about why the post- 1964 military regimes are likely to resist all pressure for observance of human rights which, if true (and this reviewer lacks the knowledge of Latin America to say whether it is or not), means quick improvement of the situation is unlikely. The rest of the essay is a competent description of the Latin American situation in early 1977, but is now out of date. It does remind the reader that official United States concern for human rights began in Congress in 1974, not with the Carter administration.

None of the authors is satisfied with the current human rights situation, and all want to help create an

international system that will ensure effective protection of all human rights. Falk has given up on the state system, and so seeks an alternative to it; the others expect the state system to last for some time, and so concentrate on measures that will improve it. Seeing that some states do protect many rights, they seek governmental and private action that will make all states move from paying lip- service to the notion of human rights to serving it effectively.

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The concept of Human Rights Essay

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Introduction

Human rights- legitimation, human rights – justification, reference list.

Normally, the conventional comprehension of human rights is the absolute basic rights to which an individual is naturally entitled because he or she is a human being. Therefore, human rights are considered universal (valid the world over) and egalitarian (no different for everybody).

These rights might be present as natural rights or as legal rights, both in state and international regulation. The policy of human rights in global carry out within international edict, worldwide, and local institutions in the strategies of nations and the actions of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), has been a basis of public guiding principle around the world (Glenn 2011).

The concept of human rights affirms that, given that the public discussion of peacetime international society is alleged to have a universal proper language, then it is one of the human rights. Nevertheless, the strong allegations made by the policy of human rights keep on provoking substantial doubt and debates with reference to the nature, content, and validations of human rights to date. Unquestionably, the issue of what is denoted by a right is itself contentious, and a topic of continued rational debate.

As countered to charity, the subject of rights picks out entitlement in place of need, and consequently presupposes equal opportunity between donors and recipients of assistance. Formal complement between duties and rights signifies that, if an individual or a group possesses rights, in that case, another individual or group has the obligation to respect those rights.

Many of the fundamental initiatives, which animated the human rights movement, emerged in the after effects of the World War II and the mayhem of the Holocaust, leading to the legitimation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly, in the year 1948. Legitimation implies according legal status (Hooft 2009, p. 55-60), which is different from justification that implies providing explanations for taking the principles and ethics seriously.

The traditional society did not have the perception of universal human rights. Traditional societies had intricate coordination of duties, for instance, ideas of fairness, political legality, and human thriving that aimed at acquiring human dignity, thriving, or well-being entirely free of human rights. With respect to human rights, an imperfection in argument is genetic fallacy. It presumes that a norm is appropriate only to the environment of its source.

To the argument concerning the legality of the rights expressed in the UDHR, human rights are universal. This signifies that human rights are applicable everywhere in the world. Pragmatic positivism is an endeavour to escape resolving the most significant of theoretical difficulties, that of the character of continuation. The basis of pragmatic positivism is repudiation to face the fundamental philosophical clash between idealism and greed, which brings about rejection of greed.

The transformationist conception of human rights is an argument that, in every cultural tradition, a number of people at several times have used defective perceptions of human rights that restrict protection of human rights to in-groups, whereas there is exclusion of out-groups (Hooft 2009, pp.61-65).

The perception of rights has functional reality all societies. This comprises even those that do not officially admit that perception because all people are born free and alike in solemnity and rights. Human beings posses reason, as well as sense of wrong and right, and ought to act towards each other in a spirit of goodwill.

Charles Taylor holds that, rights are not merely the only perception that could generate order in society and harmony between countries. There can be dissimilar pathways to the same target (Taylor 1999, pp.124-127). This implies that there is a likelihood of overlapping consensus on the human rights even amongst persons from diverse traditions. Taylor comprehends subjective rights as protection or liberty that is deemed as it were the possession of someone.

For instance, rather than saying that it is incorrect to murder me, it is alleged that I possess a right to life. According to Taylor, diverse groups, nations, religious societies, cultures while embracing incompatible essential perspectives on human nature, religion, or metaphysics, could come to a concurrence on particular norms that should govern human conduct.

Each could have its individual way of validating this from out of its thorough background plan. In this regard, we would concur on the norms, whereas differing on their being the right norms. Moreover, we would be satisfied to reside in this consensus, unbothered by the distinctions of deep underlying conviction (Taylor 1999, pp. 128-130).

Leaders in East Asia like Lee Kwan Yew consider something hazardously distinctive, dissolvent of society, fragmenting, in the western legal civilization (certainly, they have mainly in mind or their views the US).

Nevertheless, in their disapproval of Western conversation of human rights, they as well appear to be assaulting the fundamental values of the West, which purportedly gives dominance to the person, where allegedly a Confucian point of view could have a bigger place for the society, and the intricate mesh of human relations where every person stands.

In Asian communities, human rights may be defended through communitarian arguments without choice of western-style legal processes. How rights might be defended, in such Asian societies, without recourse to Western-style legal processes. This involves not inquiring so much the legal types, but articulating divergence with the fundamental philosophical explanation.

In Taylor’s account, Thai Buddhism may sustain human rights by turning from a focus on obtaining advantage and even earthly victory via blessings and performances of piety, as well as concentrating more on the unique objective of enlightenment. This attempts to go back to initial core of Buddhism regarding circumventing of suffering.

These produce perceptions of Buddhism as a foundation for democratic community and practice. Commitment of Buddhism to democracy, fairness, and human rights call for respect (Taylor 1999, pp. 131-137). This feature of western rights discourse is often particularly difficult to export, as it comes across societies where there is consideration of particular social differences as highly significant, and they are viewed sequentially as connected with particular ways, which are now considered as biased in Western societies.

Mainly as in the West, we are distant from having dealt with how to merge gender equality with our thoughts of gender dissimilarity. By “affirmation of ordinary life”, Taylor means the enormous cultural revolution that has been happening in modernity. In the development of Western ethical mindsets, this played a role of augmenting life and reducing suffering, thus leading to an exemplary life that is smacked of egotism and pride.

Westerners might come to comprehend the inherent sense of Shari’a law as the effortless outcome of pre-modern delusions, in the same group where they currently position the ancient rule execution scenarios (Taylor 1999, pp. 138-144).

An obstruction, in the course to a common understanding involving cultural traditions internationally, comes from the incapacity of several Westerners to perceive their culture like one amid many. To this degree, they will have a tendency of assuming that the path to union necessitates that others, as well cast off traditional notions, they even discard their religious legacy, and turn into unmarked moderns as them.

Cosmopolitan values for global relocation accept two justifications both associated with arguments on human rights: an intrinsic and a practical perception. The intrinsic justification, from this viewpoint of human rights, is deemed to come from natural rights. The practical justification of human rights aims at illustrating the implication of a human right to lowest values of well-being, based on a universal concurrence, on the role that the values of justice ought to play at the global level.

This perception deems the practical justification as distinct from the subject of their character. Subjectivity is an argument that has precedence because it comprises rights to basic needs (Hooft 2009, pp. 66-70. The importance of the concept of subjectivity is in justifying the precedence of individual rights.

Needs have precedence over desires and is an objective worth that can almost not be denied. Strongly desiring something does not ascertain that an individual has a right to it since that is just expression of want. Nussbaum affirms ten basic human capabilities (Hooft 2009, pp.71-81).

These include life (not dying too early), bodily health (ability to have good health, shelter, and food), bodily integrity (liberated to move free of assault and having sexual choice as well as gratification). They also comprise imagination, senses, and thought (able to use these maximally and excellently), emotions, practical reason, affiliation (ability to reside with and near others), other species (having concern for plants, nature, and animals), play, and control over the environment.

The utilitarian approach, which asks individuals what they presently desire and how content they are, is inadequate to deal with the assessment of the impartiality of social and economic arrangements (Nussbaum 2003).

This argument holds because there more generally has a sufficient theory of economic impartiality, and of social impartiality, where people are prepared to make claims regarding essential rights that are to some point independent of the desires that they to have, inclinations shaped, frequently, by unfair background circumstances.

Gross National Product (GNP) is also an inadequate determinant of human and economic advancement, because it fails to disaggregate and independently consider essential features of development, like health and education, which are obviously not exceptionally well connected with GNP, even if the distribution is considered (Nussbaum 2003).

The importance of capabilities approach lies in regular arguments, in support of issues of gender equality. Nussbaum believes that, her capabilities approach provides accuracy to the talk of human rights for when people are asked what they are able to carry out and to be, there is a much closer comprehension of the obstacles societies have raised against complete fairness for women (Williams 2000).

A stress on capabilities instead of operation protects a diversity of types of life because countries are evaluated in areas like educational and health accomplishment (Nussbaum 2003).

From this paper, human rights are universally valid, and their justification signifies the giving of explanations for taking the principles and ideals critically, whereas their legitimation denotes giving officially authorized significance.

The significance of depending on a perception of basic need in justifying the precedence of individual rights indicates that, needs have a main concern over desires. In addition, basic needs can validate an affirmation of rights as claims to human continued existence and a simply adequate survival (Keith 2012).

Glenn, H 2011, ‘The Concept of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Journal of Religious Ethics , vol.39 no.1, pp. 1-24.

Hooft, S 2009, Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics , Acumen, Durham.

Keith, S 2012, ‘A Declaration of Human Responsibilities’, Contemporary Review, vol. 294 no. 1704, pp. 46-53.

Nussbaum, M 2003, ‘Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice’, Feminist Economics, vol. 9 no. 3, pp. 33-59.

Taylor, C 1999, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus of Human Rights”, in J Bauer & D Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights , Cambridge University Press Cambridge, Cambridge, pp. 124-144.

Williams, J 2000, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It , Oxford University Press, New York.

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United States Mission to the United Nations

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Joint Statement on the Human Rights Situation in Afghanistan

United States Mission to the United Nations Office of Press and Public Diplomacy For Immediate Release September 6, 2024

(The following is a joint statement delivered by Ambassador Kazuyuki Yamazaki, Permanent Representative of Japan, on behalf of Ecuador, France, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.)

We, the Security Council members that have a strong interest in the human rights situation in Afghanistan -Ecuador, France, Guyana, Malta, Mozambique, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and my own country Japan- have come together today to express our deep concern about the so-called “morality law” which was announced by the Taliban recently.

We condemn in the strongest terms the Taliban’s continued systemic gender discrimination and oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan. On top of the existing edicts, this new directive confirms and extends wide-ranging and far-reaching restrictions on personal conduct and provides inspectors with broad powers of enforcement, thus deepening the already unacceptable restrictions on the enjoyment by all Afghans of human rights and fundamental freedoms. It is raising further serious concerns among all Afghan citizens as it will negatively impact many areas of their lives.

The Security Council has discussed the dire human rights situation in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover three years ago, and has raised a united voice on multiple occasions. Among others, the Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2681 in April 2023 to call for the full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women and girls in Afghanistan.

Today, we once again urge the Taliban to swiftly reverse all the policies and practices that restrict the enjoyment by women and girls of their human rights and fundamental freedoms. The Taliban need to listen and respond to the voices of Afghan women and girls by respecting their rights to education and for women, to work as well as the freedoms of expression and movement. It is a prerequisite for a stable, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan.

We also urge all States and organizations to use their influence, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, to promote an urgent reversal of these policies and practices. We would like to stress that the Taliban’s actions of this kind only undermine the international community’s efforts to engage with them, as demonstrated during the Special Envoys’ meeting in Doha two months ago, to realize an Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors, fully reintegrated into the international community and meeting international obligations.

Afghanistan has committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is a party to a number of human rights treaties, particularly the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Afghanistan’s obligations under international law must be fulfilled.

We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate our full support to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan in tackling this issue. The Taliban’s ban on the Special Rapporteur to enter Afghanistan is disturbing, and he should be able to fully carry out his mandate.

Afghan citizens, especially women and girls, have suffered for far too long. Day by day, Afghan women and girls lose their opportunities and hope for their future. This is unacceptable. We are committed to doing our utmost to holistically address their plight and will continue to monitor the situation closely.

By United States Mission to the United Nations | 6 September, 2024 | Topics: Highlights , Remarks and Highlights

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New UN report details Nicaragua’s ongoing human rights crisis

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The human rights situation in Nicaragua has "seriously deteriorated" over the past year, following arbitrary arrests, mistreatment of detainees, attacks on Indigenous people, and intimidation of political opponents, according to a UN human rights office (OHCHR) report released on Tuesday.

Human rights violations in Nicaragua have been ongoing since 2018 when university students and other civil society activists began protesting a new Social Security Act and calling for the president to step down.

The violent crackdown by security forces directed by the Government of President Daniel Ortega resulted in numerous deaths and injuries, and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, religion, and other rights, under  a “weaponised” justice system , according to independent rights experts.

The new OHCHR report , which covered a 12-month period from June 15, 2023, is based on 120 interviews with victims and witnesses of human rights violations, and civil society and other meetings.

The report said that “ persecution of opponents to the Government or those perceived as dissenting voices has progressively been extended and intensified .”

Report findings

OHCHR ’s report found that human rights defenders, independent media outlets and other organizations advocating for political change without any Government recognition have been persecuted by authorities, following the closure of hundreds of civil society groups.

“The authorities continue to persecute not only those who express dissenting opinions but also any individual or organisation that operates independently or does not fall directly under their control,” the report said.

Last week, Nicaraguan authorities proposed a draft bill that would allow individuals abroad who allegedly committed crimes such as money laundering or terrorism, to be prosecuted, according to the report.

This raises public concern that the law could be used to “pressure and intimidate exiled citizens and foreigners for the legitimate exercise of their right to freedom of expression , and other rights.”

Increase in violence

The report detailed a dozen cases where detainees were tortured through various forms of sexual abuse and electric shocks.

Indigenous peoples and people of African descent have also experienced forms of violence with at least two reported killings by those seeking to expropriate land.

“The killings and other violent attacks, including gender-based violence, the deliberate burning of homes and illegal appropriation of Indigenous land and property were carried out in a context of widespread impunity ,” the report said.

Religious groups have also faced further “undue restrictions”, including 27 Catholic priests and seminarians wrongly arrested between October 2023 and January 2024, the report cites. Additionally, many religious groups have seen their legal non-governmental organization status revoked.

A ‘multi-faceted crisis’

OHCHR’s chief, Volker Türk, said the crisis that has affected Nicaragua since 2018 is multi-faceted and there needs to be an “urgent change of path from the Government.”

“ It is distressing to see civic space continuing to be severely eroded in Nicaragua , and how the exercise of fundamental civil and political rights is becoming more and more difficult,” Mr. Türk said.

“The 2026 elections offer a new opportunity”, he continued. “It is crucial that the right to political participation is fully respected for Nicaraguans to be able to safely and freely decide the future of their country.”

The rights chief is encouraging the Government to immediately release all those arbitrarily detained, ensure fair trials, end torture and ill-treatment, and reinstate the legal status of civil society organizations and opposition parties.

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Analysis of the human rights situation in drc - july 2024 infographics, attachments.

General situation: evolution of human rights violations and abuses since January 2024

The security situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, marked by widespread violence gave rise to numerous human rights violations and abuses. Between January and July 2024, the UNJHRO documented 2,278 human rights violations and abuses in the provinces affected by the conflict. In North Kivu, the human rights situation continued to deteriorate due to clashes between the Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo (FARDC) and the M23/RDF coalition. Furthermore, the M23's territorial gain towards Lubero territory was accompanied by numerous violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. At the same time, attacks by other armed groups such as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the Coopérative de développement du Congo (CODECO), the Mai-Mai, the Zaire group, the FDRL and others intensified in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. Despite Operation Shujja by the Congolese and Ugandan armies against the ADF, this group carried out deadly attacks against civilians, resulting in mass murders, kidnappings and destruction of property. The rise in power of the Wazalendo, who fight alongside the FARDC, has also contributed to insecurity and an increase in human rights abuses, with attacks on civilians in the Petit and Grand Nord Kivu territories.

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